Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (Benjamins Translation Library)

Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts

Benjamins Translation Library (BTL) The BTL aims to stimulate research and training in translation and interpreting studies. The Library provides a forum for a variety of approaches (which may sometimes be conflicting) in a socio-cultural, historical, theoretical, applied and pedagogical context. The Library includes scholarly works, reference books, postgraduate text books and readers in the English language.

EST Subseries The European Society for Translation Studies (EST) Subseries is a publication channel within the Library to optimize EST’s function as a forum for the translation and interpreting research community. It promotes new trends in research, gives more visibility to young scholars’ work, publicizes new research methods, makes available documents from EST, and reissues classical works in translation studies which do not exist in English or which are now out of print.

General Editor

Associate Editor

Honorary Editor

Yves Gambier

Miriam Shlesinger

Gideon Toury

Rosemary Arrojo

Zuzana Jettmarová

Rosa Rabadán

Michael Cronin

Werner Koller

Sherry Simon

Daniel Gile

Alet Kruger

Mary Snell-Hornby

José Lambert

Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit

John Milton

Maria Tymoczko

University of Turku

Bar-Ilan University Israel

Tel Aviv University

Advisory Board Binghamton University Dublin City University Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle

Ulrich Heid

University of Stuttgart

Amparo Hurtado Albir

Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

W. John Hutchins

University of East Anglia

Charles University of Prague Bergen University UNISA, South Africa Catholic University of Leuven University of São Paulo

Franz Pöchhacker

University of Vienna

Anthony Pym

University of León Concordia University University of Vienna University of Joensuu

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Lawrence Venuti

Temple University

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Volume 89 Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts. Literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia Edited by Brian James Baer

Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts Literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia Edited by

Brian James Baer Kent State University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contexts, subtexts and pretexts : literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia / edited by Brian James Baer. p. cm. (Benjamins Translation Library, issn 0929-7316 ; v. 89) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.  Translating and interpreting--Russia (Federation) 2.  Translating and interpreting-Theory, etc.  I. Baer, Brian James. P306.8.R8C66   2011 418’.020947--dc22 2010043358 isbn 978 90 272 2437 8 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8733 5 (Eb)

© 2011 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents Acknowledgments Notes on contributors Introduction: Cultures of translation Brian James Baer

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part i.  Contexts Shifting contexts: The boundaries of Milan Kundera’s Central Europe Charles Sabatos Nation and translation: Literary translation and the shaping of modern Ukrainian culture Vitaly Chernetsky Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation David L. Cooper

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Romania as Europe’s translator: Translation in Constantin Noica’s national imagination Sean Cotter

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Translating India, constructing self: Konstantin Bal’mont’s India as image and ideal in Fin-de-siècle Russia Susmita Sundaram

97

The water of life: Resuscitating Russian avant-garde authors in Croatian and Serbian translations Sibelan Forrester

117

Translation trouble: Translating sexual identity into Slovenian Suzana Tratnik

137

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part ii.  Subtexts Between the lines: Totalitarianism and translation in the USSR Susanna Witt Translation theory and cold war politics: Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov in 1950s America Brian James Baer The poetics and politics of Joseph Brodsky as a Russian poet-translator Yasha Klots Squandered opportunities: On the uniformity of literary translations in postwar Hungary László Scholz Meaningful absences: Byron in Bulgarian Vitana Kostadinova

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part iii.  Pretexts Translated by Goblin: Global challenge and local response in Post-Soviet translations of Hollywood films Vlad Strukov

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“No text is an island”: Translating Hamlet in twenty-first-century Russia Aleksei Semenenko

249

Russian dystopia in exile: Translating Zamiatin and Voinovich Natalia Olshanskaya

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Between cosmopolitanism and hermeticism: Translating classical tragedy into Polish theater Allen J. Kuharski

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The other polysystem: The impact of translation on language norms and conventions in Latvia Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

295

Translation as condition and theme in Milan Kundera’s novels Jan Rubeš

317

Index

323

Acknowledgments I would like to thank my colleagues and Ph.D. students at the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Kent State University for their feedback. I owe a special debt of thanks to Judy Wakabayashi for her insightful editorial comments, and to Claudia Angelelli, whose unfailing support and constant good humor helped make this volume a reality. David L. Cooper’s article, “Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation” first appeared in Russian Review 66(2), 2007, pp. 185–203. A slightly revised version of the article is printed in this volume with the kind permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Notes on contributors Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian Language, Literature, and Translation Studies at Kent State University in the Institute for Applied Linguistics. He is the co-editor of Volume XII in the ATA Scholarly Monograph Series, Beyond the Ivory Tower: ReThinking Translation Pedagogy and the author of Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity (Palgrave, 2009). He is also the founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) and the general editor of the Kent State Scholarly Monograph Series in Translation Studies. Vitaly Chernetsky is Professor Associate of Russian, at Miami University (Oxford, OH) where he teaches Russian and East European literatures and film. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2007) and a co-editor of Crossing Centuries (2000), a comprehensive anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in English translation, as well as of the annotated Ukrainian translation of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (2007). His translation of The Moscoviad, a novel by the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych, which constituted a major postcolonial response to the collapse of the USSR, was published by Spuyten Duyvil Press in 2008. David L. Cooper is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches Czech and Russian languages and literatures. He is author of the monograph Creating the Nation: Identity and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Russia and Bohemia (Northern Illinois), which examines the transformation of Czech and Russian literary discourse with the incorporation of the modern concept of the nation and the consequent impetus that literature gave to national movements. Sean Cotter is Associate Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he collaborates with the Center for Translation Studies. A specialist in International Modernism and twentieth-century Romanian literature, he is also the translator of seven books (three in collaboration) of contemporary Romanian poetry and prose, most recently Lightwall by Liliana Ursu (Zephyr Press, 2009). He is currently writing a study of Romanian translators under communism. Sibelan Forrester is Professor of Russian at Swarthmore College, and currently Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. She has published numerous articles on Russian literature, co-edited three books (most recently, Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures in an East-West Gaze, 2004), and translated among

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other things (from Russian) Elena Ignatova’s poetry, Воздушный колокол/The Diving Bell (Zephyr Press, 2006) and (from Croatian) Irena Vrkljan’s first volume of lyrical autobiography, The Silk, the Shears (Northwestern UP, 1999). Allen J. Kuharski is Stephen Lang Professor of Performing Arts and chair of the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College. His articles, reviews, and interviews on various aspects of Polish and American theater have been widely published in the United States, Great Britain, Poland, France, Austria, and the Netherlands. His translations of Witold Gombrowicz and Eugène Ionesco have been widely performed in the United States and abroad. He has served as Performance Review Editor and Associate Editor for Theatre Journal and is a co-editor of the sixteen-volume Collected Works (Pisma zebrane) of Gombrowicz published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Cracow. He is the recipient of the Order of Merit for Polish Culture (2002) and the Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz Award (2006). Gunta Ločmele, Dr. Philol., is a Professor at the University of Latvia. She has published approximately 60 research works since 1987, and these deal mainly with the language of advertising, translation and interpreting, the Latvian language, and language contacts. She sits on several editorial boards and occupies various positions within Latvia’s academic community. Her international contacts include a Fulbright Research Fellowship at Kent State University, USA, in 2001–2002. Yasha Klots is a doctoral student at Yale University. His interests include contemporary Russian poetry, literary translation, linguistics, urban studies and photography. He is writing his dissertation on Joseph Brodsky and Russian-American poetry. He is a co-translator of Sergei Dovlatov’s The Outpost [Filial] and Tamara Petkevich’s Memoir of a Gulag Actress (Northern Illinois). He is also the editor of a collection of Joseph Brodsky’s translations into Russian (Azbuka). Vitana Kostadinova is Principal Lecturer of English at the Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Her research interests lie in the areas of British Romanticism and Reception studies, and her publication record reveals a particular focus on Byron. She publishes both in English and in Bulgarian and has contributed to the Byron and Shelley volumes of The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe series, to the Byron Journal, to the French Byron Society journal, and to a number of collected volumes. She is presently completing a monograph based on her doctorate, The Reception of Byron in Bulgaria. Natalia Olshanskaya is Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Kenyon College, USA. She has taught courses in translation studies at the Odessa State University (Ukraine), the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), and the College of William and Mary (Virginia, US). She has worked as an interpreter and translator, and has published numerous articles on the theory and practice of translation.



Notes on contributors 

Jan Rubeš is a professeur at l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he is the director of the Center for Czech Studies. He is the author or several books on Prague and has translated various Czech authors into French. Charles Sabatos received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He currently teaches in the English language and literature department at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey. His main fields of research include modern Czech, Slovak, Turkish, and American literary and cultural history. His translation of Ever Green is... by Pavel Vilikovsky was published by Northwestern University Press. László Scholz is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College, Ohio, and at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His main research interests include modern Latin American fiction, short story analysis, and the theory and practice of literary translation. His academic publications include monographs, literary histories, textbooks, and numerous essays and readers. He is one of the most sought after literary translators and editors of Spanish and Latin American literature into Hungarian with a long list of works by Borges, Cela, Carpentier, Cortázar, García Márquez, Onetti, Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Vargas Llosa. Aleksei Semenenko is a lecturer in Semiotics at Stockholm University, Sweden. His background is in the University of Tartu, and he holds a PhD in Russian Literature from Stockholm University. He has published several articles on Shakespeare, translation, genre theory, Russian and Soviet literature, and is currently working on a project on Jurij Lotman’s semiotics of culture. Vlad Strukov is Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies and the Centre for World Cinemas at the . He has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Moscow, Pittsburgh and London. He is a new media curator and the founding editor of Static, an international journal supported by the Tate and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is co-editor with Helena Goscilo of the collection Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic (Routledge), as well as the Historical Dictionary of Contemporary Russia (Scarecrow Press), co-edited with Robert Saunders. Dr. Strukov’s research on film, animation, mass media, and national identity has appeared in Slavic and East European Journal, Animation, and other publications. Susmita Sundaram received her PhD from the Ohio State University. Her primary research concerns Russian Orientalism in the Silver Age and the role of translation of Eastern texts in Russian culture. Having lived and worked in Russia during the late 1990s, she also studies post-Soviet Russian culture, in particular feminism and film. Her translations of modern Russian prose have appeared in Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States. Suzana Tratnik graduated with a degree in Sociology and completed her MA in Gender Anthropology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She lives and works in

 Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts

Ljubljana as a writer, translator, and publicist. She has published five short stories collections Pod ničlo (Bellow Zero), Na svojem dvorišču (In One’s Own Backyard), Vzporednice (Parallels), Česa nisem nikoli razumela na vlaku (Things I’ve Never Understood on the Train) and Dva svetova (Two Worlds), two novels Ime mi je Damjan (My Name is Damjan) and Tretji svet (Third World), a play and two non-fiction books. In 2007 she was rewarded the national Prešeren’s Fund Prize for the best book-length work of fiction in Slovenian. Her books and short stories have been translated into more than fifteen languages. Suzana Tratnik has translated several books of British and American fiction, non-fiction and drama. Andrejs Veisbergs, Dr. Habil. Philol. is a Professor at the University of Latvia. His many research publications since 1985 are mainly devoted to idioms, borrowing, Latvian, Language Contacts, translation and interpreting, and lexicography. He is the author of the largest Latvian-English Dictionary (1997, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003, Second edition 2005) as well as the author on several monographs on Latvian idioms, contrastive linguistics, and conference interpreting (2007, 2009). Since 2004 he has served as the Chairman of the Presidential Latvian Language Commission and occupies many other positions within the Latvian language and academic community and on many editorial boards as well. He is a Corresponding Member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, a member of Euralex, and a consultant to Oxford English Dictionaries. He is also an accredited interpreter for the European Commission and Parliament and other international organization. Has had the pleasure of interpreting for US Presidents Clinton and Bush, and for the Dalai lama. Susanna Witt, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stockholm University. She is the author of the monograph Creating Creation: Readings of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (2000) and articles on works by Pasternak (including his 1940 Hamlet translation), Tsvetaeva and Bulgakov. Her current research project, “Totalitarianism and Translation,” examines the heterogenous functions of literary translation in the Soviet context of the Stalin period, focusing particularly on practices which relativize the concept of authorship, such as the use of interlinear trots.

Introduction Cultures of translation Brian James Baer

Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA

The exploration of alternative, non-Western translation traditions – largely Asian but recently African, as well – has become increasingly visible in recent years as a reaction to hegemonic Western models of translation and the general eurocentrism of contemporary Translation Studies (Hung and Wakabayashi 2005, Hermans 2006, Cheung 2006, Kothari and Wakabayashi 2009, and Inggs and Meintjes 2009). And while scholars like Hung and Wakabayashi are careful not to posit an essential “Asian” identity, they nevertheless use “the West” – often interchangeably with “Western Europe” and even “Europe” – as though it were an unproblematic and unified identity. As the Balkan historian Maria Todorova cautioned: “While ‘East’ has become less common recently, this has not affected the casual usage of ‘West’” (1997: 10). And so, while studies of alternative, non-Western traditions are crucial to the effort to “enlarge translation” and to instill more reflective practice, if we fail to problematize the “West” as an identity, we run the risk of reconstituting the long-standing dichotomy of East-West along a postmodern divide. Within that construct the cultures of the “East” are imagined as resisting fixed, restrictive identities in favor of a liberating fluidity that cannot be contained or reduced to a single set of theories or practices – “pluralized Asias,” to quote Gayatri Spivak (2008: 2) – that must be “examined on a case-by-case basis,” and that represent only “local moments of translation” (Kothari and Wakabayashi 2009: 5). In other words, to “de-center” Western notions of translation by appealing exclusively to cultures that are geographically outside the West may obscure the otherness within Europe itself and so unwittingly reinforce the mythic unity and power of the West as center. It is important, therefore, to remember that fault lines of power run through Western culture(s), complicating purely geographical models of center and periphery and demanding a thoroughly dialectical approach in any investigation of the construction of East and West. By introducing into the discussion Europe’s internal other – the cultures of Eastern Europe and Russia – which has largely been ignored in the exploration of alternative translation traditions, this volume of collected essays is intended to serve as an

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intervention in the scholarly mapping of translation in the tradition of Maria Tymoczko’s Translation in a Postcolonial Context (1999), Anthony Pym’s Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Interculture in Hispanic History (2000), and Edwin Gentzler’s Translation and Identity in the Americas (2008), especially Chapter Two, “Multiculturalism in the United States.” These works do not simply challenge the hegemony of Western models but also challenge any simple notion of Western identity itself by exposing the cultural otherness within the West. The examination of the role of translation in the cultural development of Eastern Europe and Russia has much to contribute to this line of research, something James Holmes suspected back in the 1970s (1988:93, 99). It is, perhaps, no coincidence that in the introduction to their volume on translation in India, Kothari and Wakabayashi quote none other than the Czech author Milan Kundera, who accuses dominant cultures of being complacent and uninterested in other cultures – in a word, provincial (2009: 5).

The other Europe This volume is not meant to complicate the current mapping of East-West merely by triangulating the field or by positioning these vast geographic and cultural territories along some kind of developmental cline, of Eastern Europe as a third “identity” is deeply problematic. As Larry Wolff argues in Inventing Eastern Europe (1994), Eastern Europe as a coherent, unitary “identity” was largely imagined and imposed by the West. “The Enlightenment,” Wolff contends, “had to invent Western Europe and Eastern Europe together, as complementary concepts, defining each other by opposition and adjacency” (5). Many define the regions not in strict geographic terms, which would argue for the inclusion of Russia and Turkey, for example, but in more subjective terms as a state of mind marked by a sense of inferiority vis-à-via a more economically developed West, or as the worldview of “small” nations with a common experience of imperial oppression. Pynset and Kanikova, for example, include the “small nations” of Finland and Greece in their Reader’s Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature and leave out Turkey, despite its geographic toehold in Europe. As a deliberate challenge to the romantic notion of Eastern Europe as a community of oppressed nations, this volume adopts a geographic definition of the region that includes Russia, an enormous multi-ethnic, multi-lingual empire, on the one hand, but one that has nonetheless experienced the inferiority complex of “smaller nations.” Although we recognize that geography, too, is an interpretive construct, involving a variety of inclusions and exclusions, by including Russia here we hope to resist the temptation of (re)imposing too coherent an identity on the region, challenging from the outset any direct and deterministic relationship between political formations and cultural identity. In any case, the ontological status of Eastern Europe is currently contested, perhaps as never before, with many arguing for a conceptual remapping of the region. Some advocate for resurrecting the notion of Central Europe while others



Introduction

propose introducing the concept of Eurasia, although none of these new “mappings” is any more stable than the others. As Christopher Lord, the editor of the collection Central Europe: Core of Periphery?, notes: “The shuttle of the loom of history which was dropped in 1939 (if not in 1914) cannot just be picked up again, and the idea of a European core that existed a hundred years ago may just be a myth. Central Europe may not exist” (2000: 9). However unstable the notion of Eastern Europe may be, it is inseparably linked in the Western imagination with the element of time, “where the movement from past to future was not merely motion but evolution from simple to complex, backward to developed, primitive to cultivated. The element of time with its developmental aspect has been an important, and nowadays the most important, characteristic of contemporary perception of East and West” (Todorova 1997: 12). It is important to remember, however, that this developmental model is of fairly recent origin, a product, according to Wolff, of the Western Enlightenment. Before that, Europe was conceived largely in terms of North-South, not East-West, and, as Todorova points out, “Only after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the eclipse of the Orthodox Church, but especially with the unique economic takeoff of Western Europe, was East internalized also by the Orthodox world as the less privileged of the opposition pair” (1997: 11). Whether viewed as old Europe or new Europe, Eastern Europe’s association with otherness goes well beyond its developmental differences from the West. It was for centuries “home” to the largest populations of Christian Europe’s others: Jews, Roma, and Muslims, groups that have at various points in history posed a greater or lesser challenge to nationalist aspirations built on the dream of a perfect congruence of land, language and ethnicity. The notion of Eastern Europe as a repository of non-Western influences was expressed by former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, George Kennan, in 1993, during the height of the Balkan crisis: “What we are up against is the sad fact that developments of those earlier ages, not only those of the Turkish domination but of earlier ones as well, had the effect of thrusting into the southeastern reaches of the European continent a salient of non-European civilization which has continued to the present day to preserve many of its non-European characteristics” (quoted in Todorova 1997: 6). Vulnerable to invasion and occupation from beyond Europe’s borders (the Mongols in Russia and the Ottoman Turks in the Balkan region), Eastern Europe has long served, in the words of the writer Gregor von Rezzori, as “a meeting point (or chafing point, if you will) between two civilizations” (2008: 10). It is a region defined by its in-betweenness in a way and to a degree the Occident is not.

Translation and belatedness Despite the instability, if not incoherence, of the West’s mapping of Eastern Europe, there are at least three factors – or “common situations,” to use Milan Kundera’s term (1984:107) – that allow us to speak in terms, albeit broad and provisional, of a common

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cultural context in which to discuss the phenomenon of translation in Eastern Europe and Russia. First, the construction of Eastern Europe from within a Western developmental model produced the region as “backward,” a phenomenon described succinctly by Norman Davies in the article “West-Best, East-Beast” (1997). This perceived backwardness relegated the region to an imitative relationship with its more developed neighbors to the West. Jean-Jacques Rousseau made this point in The Social Contract in his discussion of “young” or “immature” nations. When the Russian tsar Peter the Great forcibly “westernized” the Russian administrative structures and the culture of the upper classes and subjected his “young” nation to laws, he displayed, in Rousseau’s judgment, “a genius for imitation [le génie imitatif]; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing” (1950: 43). This notion of an imitative genius was soon interpolated by members of the cultural élite throughout Eastern Europe and Russia. As Count Istvan Szechenyi, the founder of the Hungarian Academy, lamented in 1831: “We have no national habits; our existence and knowledge depend on imitation. Unlike other nations, we stick to the old and are superficial in imitating others” (quoted in Szegedy-Maszak 2001: 87). Of course, the notion that this “imitative genius,” this penchant for translation, is somehow unique to Eastern Europe and Russia is highly dubious insofar as the “conflict between imitation and isolation, other and self ” lies at the heart of all nationalist agendas, despite the nationalists’ insistence that truly national “cultures defied translatability” (Szegedy-Maszák 2001: 48, 50). As Lawrence Venuti points out, “the national status of a language and culture is simultaneously presupposed and created through translation. Insofar as such [nationalist] agendas implicitly reveal the incompleteness of the nation, translation is a scandal to nationalist thinking, providing yet another motive for indignation and offense, for perceiving a translated text as an international act of violence” (2005: 178). But while these cultures may have been no more dependent on translations than their counterparts in Western Europe had been when they were developing and institutionalizing a modern national identity, the fact that so many of the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia asserted their nationalist aspirations during the Romantic Age – in part, as a reaction to the Napoleonic Wars – greatly exascerbated the “scandal” described by Venuti. The Romantic cult of originality and local culture problematized the reliance on translation as, perhaps, never before. As Antoine Berman argues, Romanticism subjected cultures to the “trial of the foreign” (1984). The perception that the peoples of Eastern Europe needed to “catch up” to a moredeveloped West and to compensate for their belated entry into modernity made translation a highly visible, often self-conscious, and much-discussed practice there. Translation was both an embarrassing reminder of cultural belatedness and a means to overcome it. Fully one third of the books published by the Russian Academy of Sciences in the eighteenth century were translations (Rosslyn 2000: 13). Translation became an issue of such national importance in Russia that in 1724 a law was passed “On the Preparation of the Translators of Books through the Acquisition of Skills,” and in 1768 Catherine the Great created the Association for the Promotion of the Translation



Introduction

of Foreign Books into Russian, which placed ads for translators in newspapers and paid translators for their work. The central role played by translated literature in Russia and throughout much of Eastern Europe would seem to confirm Itamar Even-Zohar’s contention that translation plays a more central, modeling role in a culture’s literary polysystem “(a) when a literature is (young), in the process of being established; (b) when a literature is either (peripheral) (within a large group of correlated literatures) or (weak), or both; and (c) when there are turning points, crises, or literary vacuums in a literature” (2004: 200– 201). While Even-Zohar’s generous use of quotation marks suggests a keen awareness of the relative nature of these terms, he nevertheless avoids any discussion of the implications of his proposed model, which is essentially a developmental one with a long tradition – Rousseau, too, talks of “young” and “mature” cultures. Moreover, EvenZohar refrains from naming the cultural yardstick by which other literatures are assessed as young, weak or lacking. For at least the past few centuries, that yardstick has been the hegemonic Western paradigm of literature as secular narrative fiction written in the vernacular. And so, while Russia had a rich tradition of sacred writings when Peter the Great “broke out a window onto Europe,” “modern” Russian literature (read: secular narrative fiction written in the vernacular) was judged by many – including Russians themselves – to be young, weak, and filled with “vacuums.” This explains the intensity with which Russian scholars and translators have defended the authenticity of the Medieval Russian epic, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, for it suggested that “modern” Russian literature was older, more mature, than many had believed. (For more on this controversy, see Baer in this volume). This need to catch up to the West helps to explain the fact that virtually all canonical Russian and Eastern European writers of the nineteenth century – and many in the twentieth century, as well – engaged in translation in a serious and sustained manner. Moreover, it remains a common publishing practice in that part of the world to include translations together with original writing in collections of an author’s work. Indeed, the Russian literary writer and critic Nikolai Chernyshchevsky declared in the mid-nineteenth century that “literature in translation should be seen as an organic part of a national literature. The latter cannot be studied in its entirety, its social significance cannot be entirely understood, if the facts of literature in translation are ignored” (Etkind 1968: 5). This was over one hundred years before Gideon Toury would insist that “translations are facts of target cultures” (1995: 29). The visibility of translation as a cultural practice in Eastern Europe and Russia is also reflected in the fact that the region produced many influential translation theorists, such as the Russians Kornei Chukovskii, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Nabokov, the Czech Jiři Levý, and the Slovak Anton Popovič.1 Moreover, many cultural figures in the region took advantage of their geographic position to construct a unique role for themselves as a bridge between East and West. (For more on that, see Sundaram and Cotter in this volume.) 1.

For more on Levý and Popovič, see Beylard-Ozeroff, Králová, and Moser-Mercer 1998.

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It should also be noted that the developmental model, which constructs Russia and Eastern Europe as under-developed, affects the translation of Russian and Eastern European literature in the West. Publishers and readers at some level seek and find confirmation of this model in translations that present these cultures as “quaint” or “exotic.” As Rachel May asserts, Russian works were chosen less for their literary or aesthetic merit, and more for the local color they offered (2000: 1205). (For more on this, see Scholz in the present volume.) During the communist era, political considerations played an enormous role in selection and translation processes, and the literature that was translated into Western languages was overwhelmingly that of dissident writers. This has led some authors, most famously perhaps the Czech writer Milan Kundera, to attempt to escape the confines of an Eastern European cultural identity, to become “universal.” Today, Kundera writes exclusively in French and, moreover, has refused to allow his French works to be translated “back” into his native Czech (for more on Kundera, see Sabatos and Rubeš in this volume).

Translation and empire A second unifying factor in the region has been the historic organization of Eastern Europe and Russia around large multi-ethnic empires. One aspect of this imperial legacy is that the nation-state remains a somewhat problematic concept throughout much of this region. As Otto Pick, the former First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Czech Republic, asserts: In their ignorance of conditions in the region, Western and particularly American politicians seem really to have believed that political and ethnic frontiers could be made to coincide in Central and Eastern Europe. In fact the treaties of St. Germain (1919) and Trianon (1920) provided the incentive for the ethnic cleansing which followed several decades later. Instability became the norm for the lands between Germany and Russia, and they were picked off one by one, first by Hitler and subsequently by Stalin. (2000: 11)

At the same time, these empires fostered a certain kind of cosmopolitanism and hybridity, epitomized for von Rezzori by the speech of his peasant nursemaid, Cassandra: “The main component was a German, never learned correctly or completely, the gaps in which were filled with words and phrases from all the other tongues spoken in the Bukovina – so that each second or third word was either Ruthenian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Armenian or Yiddish, not to forget Hungarian and Turkish. From my birth, I heard mainly this idiom, and it was as natural to me as the air I breathed” (2009: 44). The enduring instability and non-congruence of national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries in “postcolonial” Eastern Europe was brought home to me in 1999 when I received a volume of poetry and prose that was printed in Sarajevo four years after the Dayton Agreement put an end to the siege of Sarajevo, the capital of the



Introduction

newly-independent Bosnia-Herzogovina. While the title of the volume – Album – hearkened back to a “gentler” time when literature was not the exclusive province of a professional few and every educated amateur was expected to have a verse at hand to write in a friend’s album, the editor’s pen name – Radko The Killer – reminded one of the brutal realities of the more recent past. The volume contained translations into Serbian, Croatian and the new national language of Bosnian, which to the untrained eye was utterly indistinguishable from the other two languages. Although previously written in Cyrillic, Radko explained, Bosnians increasingly used the Latin alphabet in the aftermath of the war with Serbia. The story of Album underscores the problematic construction of national identity in the postcolonial context of the former Yugoslavia. Ethnically Slavic, nationalistminded Croats, Serbs and Bosnians of Bosnia-Herzogovina distinguish themselves by religion and insist that their languages also reflect a “national” difference, although Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian had, not long ago, been treated by the Yugoslav state as a single language, Serbo-Croatian, albeit with two different alphabets. To this day, there is no general word in common parlance to describe a citizen of the state of Bosnia-Herzogovina. Politicians refer instead to “constituent peoples.” The term Bosniak designates a Muslim of the region while ethnic Croats and Serbs living in BosniaHerzogovina refer to themselves as (Bosnian) Croats and (Bosnian) Serbs, and to their languages as Croatian and Serbian, respectively. Radko The Killer’s Album, one could say, suggests the cross purposes to which translation is often put in our age, which is characterized no less by the endurance – and even intensification – of ethnic nationalism as it is by the growth of globalization.2 The instability of nations and national boundaries is not, however, peculiar to the “small” nations in the region. Scholars, such as Geoffrey Hosking (1997), have long argued that Russia’s identity as an empire since the sixteenth century has hampered the development of a full-fledged national identity. Even today, Nancy Condee cautions, we should not assume “that ‘nation’ is adequate to capture the dynamics of contemporary [Russian] culture” (2009: 48). In any case, the position of non-nations and small nations within the “world republic of letters” is a particularly precarious one and determines to a large extent which writers will have access to the world stage through translation. As the Slovenian writer Andrej Blatnik put it at the 2006 International Pen Conference in Ljubljana: “To exist means to be translated; those who write in English are thus already born translated, while others can become translated” (Blatnik, 2006). The legacy of empire, combined with an internalized sense of inferiority before the West, produced an educated elite throughout Eastern Europe and Russia that was – and to a great extent still is – multi-lingual, often fluent in the administrative language of empire, the “local” language(s), and the prestige language(s) of the West. It also created layers of linguistically-marked discrimination and resentment. As Pynsent and Kanikova point out, “Slovaks felt oppressed by Hungarians and Hungarians by Vienna; or 2. For more on this tension, see Suleiman 1997.

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Roumanians felt they were oppressed by Greeks and Greeks by Turks” (1993: vii).3 On the other hand, this multilingualism, fostered in part by the cosmopolitan nature of empire, allowed many established writers in the region to engage in translation, which in turn lent prestige and cultural “legitimacy” to those translated texts. Moreover, this multilingualism did not only affect the fact of translation, it also affected the general approach taken to the translation of foreign works. For example, Efim Etkind argues that because the Russian nineteenth century elite knew French and German, and so were able to read the source text, there was an expectation that translations would function as independent works of art, not as mere conveyors of source text content (Etkind 1968: 14). At the same time, multilingualism made possible a kind of “double readership.”4 That is, readers could and did compare the source and target texts, which made visible the translator’s decisions and highlighted the (Russian) “difference” – or, in Venuti’s terms, the remainder – in the target text. Under conditions of censorship, this fact became central to the construction of translation as a site of resistance for many readers, whose ability to decode oppositional content allowed them to best the censor, which served as a metonymy for the state (see Loseff 1984: 222–223). Somewhat paradoxically, the tradition of censorship throughout the region also had the effect of making literature into a privileged site for the discussion of a variety of not only aesthetic but also political and philosophical concerns, translated works of literature lending a central place in the literary polysystem(s) of the region. With the fall of the Soviet empire new cultural mappings have appeared – such as Eurasia – which represent new circuits of exchange with attendant implications for translation and translators. As Laura Garcia-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer point out, “The paradoxical situation occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Empire and its ideological underpinnings has sharpened our consciousness of national identities not confined to the binary opposition of the Cold War and forced us to play closer attention to the constitutive role that language, language policies, and cultural practices play in the shaping of these identities” (1996: vii). For example, the European Union, which has expanded into Eastern Europe since the fall of communism, has greatly affected translation practice, especially in “minor” cultures, by mandating that all EU legislative acts be translated into the official languages of all its constitutive nations. While this has provided enormous opportunities for translators of “minor” languages, it has also accelerated the pace of language change in these countries, which in turn

3. When scholars define Eastern Europe by its experience of colonial oppression, they necessarily repress Eastern Europe’s own history of colonial oppression (i.e., the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania). 4. I am adapting the term “double readership” from the term “double spectatorship” introduced by Tessa Dwyer and Ioana Uricaru to describe the way film viewers watched censored foreign films in communist Romania. Multilingual viewers were able to compare and contrast the censored subtitles and the original dialogue (2009: 46).



Introduction

has intensified debates about the preservation and protection of traditional national identity. (For more on this, see Ločmele and Veisbergs in this volume.)

Translation under communism Finally, the historical fact of communism in twentieth-century Eastern Europe and Russia did much to construct a common field of translation there, producing the interrelated phenomena of extensive government-sponsored translation and strict censorship of translation. It also had the effect of creating an alternative reading public for translations among dissidents and in exile communities. Translation under communism was largely shaped by the tension between xenophobia and internationalism. On the one hand, Soviet Russia did much to promote the translation of world literature into and out of Russian. In fact, World Literature Publishing House, founded by the writer Maxim Gorky in 1918, had the lofty goal of translating “all world literature – every world classic in all languages of all times, people, and cultures” (Leighton 1991: 7). On the other hand, the regime exercised censorship at virtually every stage of the publication process. And while Lenin supported the project as a way to further the Soviet nationalities policy, Gorky and the other writers and translators involved used it to introduce into Soviet society new translations of many of the great works of Western literature. One of the unintended effects of communism was to foster an intelligentsia that looked to world literature to express and preserve what it saw as eternal aesthetic and moral values, perceived to be threatened by the regime’s vulgar interpretations of Marxist ideology and its centralized cultural policy (Baer 2006). While Soviet-era censorship enhanced the status of literature, in general, and of translated literature, in particular, the fact that translated literature was, as a general rule, less closely monitored than original writing, made it into a vehicle for expressing alternative, if not openly oppositional, views. The opening of archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union promises to add much nuance to the history of translation in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc and to expose the often unpredictable workings of even the most-centralized, totalitarian societies. Consider, for example, the Resolution of the Central Committee of 9 December 1937 to stop the “mass withdrawal of literature,” including the works of Lenin and Stalin translated into local languages, that was occurring in some of the Central Asian republics “on the grounds that at the end of the books the names were listed of translators who had turned out to be politically tainted” (Clark and Dobrenko 2007: 264). And while the fall of communism has led to the redrawing of the political map of Europe, post-communist realities continue to unite many countries of the region. Resistance to economic and cultural marginalization and ambivalence over the influence of English are evident across the region and suggest the persistence of a common zone of translation. The daring experiments in the translation of Hollywood

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blockbusters by the Russian translator known as Goblin or recent post-Soviet translations of Shakespeare in Russia highlight the fact that translation continues to be as a vital site of resistance to global cultural and economic forces. (For more on Goblin and Shakespeare in Russia, see Strukov and Semenenko, respectively, in this volume.)

Uses of translation The historian Simon Schama referred to Holland as a “flood culture” insofar as “the notion of a communal identity retrieved from the primal flood was, to some extent, a heroic metaphor or exemplary allegory” for the Dutch (1988: 34) By analogy, we might designate Eastern Europe and Russia as “cultures of translation” to the extent that the notion of a communal identity retrieved through translation served as a heroic metaphor representing a triumph over perceived backwardness and as a way to survive the onslaught – or flood – of foreign influences. It is no coincidence that the Russian and East European approach to translation was generally target-text oriented. The target text was expected to stand on its own and compete with – or even surpass – the source text. (For more on this, see Cooper in the present volume.) The idea of Eastern Europe and Russia as a unique translation zone with its own culture of translation is explored from a variety of angles in the three sections of this volume, entitled “Contexts,” “Subtexts,” and “Pretexts,” respectively. In section one, the contributors examine the broad cultural and political contexts that helped shape the choice of texts for translation, the translation approach taken, and the reception of translated texts in the various cultures represented by Eastern Europe and Russia. This section opens with Charles Sabotos’s discussion of Czech writer Milan Kundera’s attempts to re-define his cultural context by re-introducing the concept of Central Europe and by re-thinking the notion of context itself, focusing less on specific sites of cultural production than on broad circuits of cultural exchange. Vitaly Chernetsky and David L. Cooper explore the significant – and somewhat paradoxical – role played by translation in the context of Ukrainian and Russian nationalist movements, respectively, while Susmita Sundaram and Sean Cotter discuss the concept of Eastern Europe’s unique role as a mediator – a translator, if you will – between East and West. Sundaram looks at the role played by Russian translations of the ancient Indian drama Sakuntala in the turbulent first decades of the twentieth century, while Cotter examines the twentieth-century Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica’s notion of Romania as “Europe’s translator.” Sibelan Forester looks within the larger context of Eastern Europe and Russia to trace the influence of translations of Russian avant garde poetry in post-war Yugoslavia, and Suzana Tratnik closes this section with an exploration of Slovenia as a particularly challenging context – both culturally and linguistically – for the translation of contemporary queer writing from the West, touching on many issues common throughout Eastern Europe and Russia. As Jiřina ŠmejkalováStrickland noted in the Czech context: “Since I started studying, reviewing, and



Introduction

translating feminist texts several years ago, I learned about the importance of sensitivity to the local context as well as to the level of local debates. Literally translated, most of these texts provoke in Czech audiences – both male and female – responses ranging from jokes to aggression, but rarely anything positive” (1994: 281). In section two, “Subtexts,” contributors uncover and analyze the various ways in which politics has mediated the theory and practice of translation in Eastern Europe and Russia. This section opens with an essay by Susanna Witt on the politics of translation within the multi-national Soviet Union, focusing special attention on the strange case of Dzhambul Dzhabaev. Brian James Baer leaves the borders of the Soviet Union to look at how the evolution of the translation theories of the illustrious Russian émigré “agents of translation” Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov were shaped by Cold War politics, while Yakov Klots analyzes the political aspects of the translations into Russian of another, no less famous Russian exile, Joseph Brodsky. Moving outside the Soviet Union but remaining within the communist bloc, László Scholz explores the introduction of Latin American literature into post-war Hungary in the context of its highly normative culture of translation, demonstrating how the centralized translation policies of communist Hungary constructed a specific and rather restricted image of Latin American literature. Vitana Kostadinova’s essay takes a somewhat different tack, showing how absences in the translation of Lord Byron’s poetry into Bulgarian point to a tension between the exoticization of the East in Byron’s poetry and Bulgaria’s own desire to belong to the West. The contributions in section three engage various meanings of the section title, “Pretexts,” which challenge the secondary status traditionally attributed to translated texts. When the source text is a Western classic or a Hollywood blockbuster, translation may serve as a vehicle of resistance to Western hegemony. For example Vlad Strukov explores the Russian translations of Hollywood blockbusters by the translator known as Goblin as a “pretext” for a unique and wildly successful commentary on the cultural imperialism of the West. Allen Kuharski discusses how the high-profile production of Greek dramas in post-communist Poland served as a pretext for the discussion of “the Polish question” – or that country’s unique place in world culture. Alexei Semenenko looks at canonical Russian translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as “pretexts” for parody and stylistic innovation on the part of post-Soviet writers and translators. In a related vein, Natalia Olshanskaya explores the particular textual chronologies created by the phenomena of censorship and exile, which have led, in the case of the Russian dystopian novel, to the appearance of a translation before the publication of the original, making the translation literally a “pre-text” of the original, which has a variety of political and interpretive implications. Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs challenge the primacy of “original” writing in by the enormous influence of “translation language” on – literary polysystem documenting Latvian – it is estimated that 70% of Latvian reading material is in translation! This situation, in which translated texts occupy the center of the literary polysystem and so exert tremendous pressure on original Latvian writing and speech, is, on the

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one hand, increasingly typical of a globalized world where the Internet provides easy access to translated texts (often without any indication that these texts are translations); this no doubt affects the norms of International English (as a great number of these translations are into English). On the other hand, Ločmele and Veisbergs’ work shows how particularly intense is the pace and extent of such language change in “minor” cultures, such as those in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. Translated Language is not a secondary, marginal phenomenon, the authors point out, it is the language of Latvia. The final contribution by Jan Rubeš returns to the work of the international Czech writer Milan Kundera, examining how he used translation as a pretext – now in the common sense of the term – for introducing his own “original” writing into French, the first step in his escape from the restrictive, minoritizing context of Eastern Europe. Despite the many cultures represented in this volume, there are, of course, some glaring omissions, which, I hope will be corrected in future studies of the region: Ruthenians, Albanians, Belarussians, Moldovans, and Slovaks, to name but a few. My biggest regret, however, is that I was unable to find contributors to explore the role of translation in the cultural life of the Jews, Roma, and Muslims of Eastern Europe and Russia, although the examination of groups traditionally on the vulnerable fringes of the modern nation promises to contribute much to the enlargement of the field as proposed by Tymoczko (1999). Consider, for example, Feiga Kogan’s translations from the Old Testament into Russian, in which she espouses “in twentieth-century Russian translation a return to the prosody of the Hebrew Psalms” (Rischin 1994: 193), set against the backdrop of the blackest Stalin-era anti-Semitism. As the independent scholar Ruth Rischin asserts, “Within her daily work, her papers, her translation practice, [Kogan] is an instrument of the Shekhinah, a participant in the creative outpouring of the Godhead” (1994: 216). One might also examine the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska’s translation of Yiddish poems in 1968 as an act of resistance to the unofficial anti-Semitism of Polish communist society. Those translations were published only in 1980. The culture of the region’s Roma represents special challenges for the translation researcher insofar as Roma culture remains to this day largely oral, profoundly communal, and deeply suspicious of the kind of inter-cultural exchange represented by translation. As Isabel Fonseca, the author of Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, recounts: “You will never learn our language,” a Gyspy activist – and teacher of Romani – proudly told me on a bus in Bucharest. He didn’t mean that I had a wooden ear. “For every word you record in your little notebook, we have another one – a synonym, which we use and which you can never know. Oh, you might learn these; but you won’t get how to use them, or what nuances they carry. We don’t want you to know. You should’ve been born a Romany chey [girl].” (1995: 13)



Introduction

Because of that resistance, translation played a very ambivalent role in the coordinated efforts of communist regimes in Eastern Europe to construct Roma culture in traditional nationalist terms by standardizing the language and fixing the nomadic Roma geographically through forced settlement. In any case, the fact that the missing chapters in this volume belong in many cases to sub- or supra-national groups only underscores how deeply traditional notions of the nation, understood as the coincidence of ethnicity, language and territory, continue to organize the production of knowledge in this field. At times an embarrassing reminder of the region’s cultural and economic backwardness, at other times a vehicle to overcome that very backwardness, translation in Eastern Europe and Russia has been for centuries and continues to be a highly visible practice, deeply implicated in issues of national identity and of cultural, as well as economic, development. Examining translation within the context of Eastern Europe and Russia can contribute to the growing literature on alternative translation traditions, although any such examination must acknowledge that the concepts of east and west – and of translation, too – are provisional and contested, rather than fixed and essential, and are profoundly shaped by cultural, economic and political contests among rivals with unequal access to the stage of world culture.

Works cited Baer, Brian James. 2006. “Literary Translation and the Construction of a Soviet Intelligentsia.” The Massachusetts Review 47.3: 537–560. Berman, Antoine. 1984. L’Épreuve de l’étranger. Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique. Paris: Gallimard. Beylard-Ozeroff, Jana Králová, and Barbara Moser-Mercer. 1998. Translation Strategies and Creativity. In Honor of Jiři Levý and Anton Popovič. Benjamins Translation Library, vol. 27. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Blatnik, Andrej. 2006. “The Global ‘Market’, Individual Fate.” In Globalizacija sveta – marginalizacija lliterature? (okrogle mize – prispevki)/ Globalisation of the world – marginalisation of literature? (round tables – papers at the International Writers Meeting – PEN). Ljubljana: PEN. Cheung, Martha. 2006. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Clark, Katerina and Evgenii Dobrenko (eds). 2007. Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953. New Haven: Yale University Press. Condee, Nancy. 2009. The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Norman. 1997. “West-Best, East-Beast.” Oxford Today 9.2: 28–31. Dwyer, Tessa and Ioana Uricaru. 2009. “Slashings and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship, and Translation. The Velvet Light Trap 63 (Spring): 45–57. Etkind, Efim. 1968. Introduction. In Mastera poeticheskogo perevoda Mastera russkogo stikhotvornogo perevoda. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 2000. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, 192–197. London and New York: Routledge.

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Brian James Baer Fonseca, Isabel. 1995. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey. New York: Vintage. Garcia-Moreno, Laura and Peter C. Pfeiffer. 1996. Introduction. In Text and Nation, ed. L. Garcia-Moreno and P. Pfeiffer, i-ix. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House. Gentzler, Edwin. 2008. Translation and Identity in the Americas. London and New York: Routledge. Hermans, Theo, ed. 2006. Translating Others, Vols. 1 and 2. Manchester: St Jerome. Holmes, James S. 1988. Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies. Edited by Raymond van den Broeck. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hosking, Geoffrey. 1997. Russian. People and Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hung, Eva and Judy Wakabayashi. 2005. Asian Translation Traditions. Manchester: St. Jerome. Inggs and Meintjes 2009. Translation Studies in Africa. Continuum Studies in Translation. London and New York: Continuum. Kothari, Rita and Judy Wakabayashi. 2009. Introduction. In Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond, edited by R. Kothari and J. Wakabayashi, 1–15. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kundera, Milan. 1984. “A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows out.” Granta 11: 95–118. Leighton, Lauren. 1991. Two Worlds, One Art: Literary Translation in Russia and America. DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press. Lord, Christopher. 2000. Foreward. In Central Europe: Core or Periphery?, edited by C. Lord, 9–10. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Loseff, Lev. 1984. On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature. Trans. Jane Bobko. Munich: Sagner. May, Rachel. 2000. “Russian. Literary Translation into English.” Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, edited by Olive Classe, 1204–1209. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. Pick, Otto. 2000. Introduction. In Central Europe: Core or Periphery?, edited by C. Lord, 11–13. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Pym, Anthony. 2000. Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Interculture in Hispanic History. Manchester: St. Jerome. Pynsent, Robert B. and S.I. Kanikova, eds. 1993. Reader’s Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature. New York: Harper Collins. Rezorri, Gregor von. 2008. Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. New York: New York Review of Books. –—. 2009. The Snows of Yesteryear. New York: New York Review of Books. Rischin, Ruth. 1994. “F. I. Kogan (1891–1974): Translator of the Psalms.” Jews and Slavs 2: 193–222. Rosslyn, Wendy. 2000. Feats of Agreeable Usefulness: Translations by Russian Women 1763–1825. Fichtenwalde: Verlag F. K. Göpfert. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1950. The Social Contract. In The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole,1–141. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. Schama, Simon. 1988. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Šmejkalová-Strickland, Jiřina. 1994. “Do Czech Women Need Feminism? Perspectives of Feminist Theories and Practices in Czechoslovakia.” Women’s Studies International Forum 17.2/3: 277–282. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2008. Other Asias. Mandel, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 1997. “The Politics of Postmodernism after the Wall.” In International Postmodernism, edited by H. Bertens and D. Fokkema. 51–64. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.



Introduction Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. 2001. Literary Canons: National and International. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in a Postcolonial Context. Manchester: St. Jerome. –—. 2007. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome. Venuti, Lawrence. 2005. “Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities.” In Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, 177–202. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe, The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, California: Stanford Univ. Press.

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part i

Contexts

Shifting contexts The boundaries of Milan Kundera’s Central Europe Charles Sabatos

Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey Milan Kundera’s 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” attempted to redraw the Cold War boundaries of Europe, arguing that the “small nations” of Central Europe were historically western, but had been “kidnapped” into an alien eastern culture. Originally written in French as “A Kidnapped West,” the essay was adapted in its better-known translation into English, subtly adjusting the boundaries between Central, Western, and Eastern Europe. Kundera’s claim for a transnational Central European identity can be seen as a form of “cultural translation” for Western readers, helping to create a new image for the region; due to the variations between these versions, however, there is no genuine “original” text authoritative borders between east and west according to which can be drawn.

Introduction More than two decades after the publication of his most successful novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, 1984) Milan Kundera is still considered one of the major figures of contemporary world literature. Few other writers from the former “Eastern Bloc” achieved such widespread popular and critical success. Yet while selling millions of copies globally, he was banned for twenty years from publishing his works in the only country that could read them in their native language, and his original texts were published only in small exile editions. Thus, at the peak of Kundera’s career, his success as a writer was almost entirely disconnected from his native Czech. Kundera did have one advantage: as an exile from Prague, he was able to position himself as a natural heir to Franz Kafka’s legacy, but from the point of view of language, Kafka and Kundera belonged to different national literary traditions. However, they did share a homeland, and as Kundera fervently believed, a common cultural tradition, that of the former Austro-Hungarian lands of Central Europe. In spring 1984, almost simultaneously with the publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera published the essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” a passionate attack on

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the Russian domination of “small nations” like Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, which had been “kidnapped” from the traditions of Western culture. This piece (which Kundera wrote in French at a time when he was still writing his fiction in Czech) helped to establish him as a leading voice for the entire region by challenging the Western reader’s assumptions about the immutable division of Europe into East and West. At the same time, by promoting a transnational Central European culture across political borders, Kundera liberated his work from the narrow national context of Czech fiction and the equally restrictive context of “East European” writing in exile. Drawing on a nostalgia for the relative tolerance of Austro-Hungarian culture repressed during the Nazi and Communist periods, Kundera helped to create a new image for the region even before the revolutions of 1989. Efforts to critique the EastWest division of Europe, and to break down Western indifference to the fate of Eastern Europe, date back to the earliest years of the Cold War, most notably in Czesław Miłosz’s 1951 The Captive Mind. However, the use of the term “Central Europe” to imply that part of Europe’s Western culture had been lost to Communist rule only became widely accepted after Kundera’s 1984 essay. As Kundera argues in “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” the “essential tragedy” of “Russia’s satellite countries” is that “these countries have vanished from the map of the West” (1984a: 103). Although the boundaries of his Central Europe are roughly those of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, he insists that “Central Europe is not a state: it’s a culture or a fate. Its borders are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation” (1984a: 106). He describes this fate as the “great common situations that reassemble peoples, regroup them in ever new ways along the imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition” (1984a: 107). While Czech culture is clearly at the heart of Kundera’s “uncertain zone of small nations between Russia and Germany,” only Poland and Hungary are fully included in this “zone”; otherwise its “imaginary borders” are left somewhat vague. Russia is explicitly excluded from the Central European tradition, while the place of other Communist nations, such as East Germany and the Balkan states, is less clear. Kundera even calls “little Austria” (which dominated Bohemia for nearly three centuries) one of the “small nations,” referring of course not to its imperial past but to its reduced, Cold War-era present. One of the essay’s notable claims refers to the Jews not only as “the principal cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central Europe,” but also as the “small nation par excellence,” moving Kundera’s “realm” further away from existing political borders and toward a cultural/ historical context. Following the appearance of Kundera’s essay, writers such as the Hungarian Györgyi Konrád and the Yugoslav Danilo Kiš promoted the concept of a transnational and multicultural Central European identity. By emphasizing the “borderline” nature of the region, Kundera and other writers can be seen as engaging in what Homi Bhabha describes as “cultural translation”: “For it is by living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the



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differences between them into a kind of solidarity” (1995: 170). In Bhabha’s interpretation, cultural translation “desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy, and, in that very act, demands a contextual specificity, a historical differentiation within minority positions” (228). Given the intersections of language, politics and identity in Central European society, Kundera’s essay is as an attempt to “translate” the historic differences between the small nations of the region into a cultural solidarity. Yet Kundera’s definition of the region is just as significant for what it leaves out, because his “imaginary borders” are “redrawn” in every version of the essay. Considering the great political influence this essay has had for over twenty years, the question of exclusion and inclusion reflects the way that the very concept of Europe has changed since the fall of the “Iron Curtain” in 1989. Kundera’s performance of cultural translation, in Bhabha’s terms, reiterates certain European “assumptions of cultural supremacy” even as it attempts to dismantle the political reality of the “Iron Curtain” between East and West.

“Kidnapped” in translation: The essay’s publication history Kundera’s concern with issues of translation can be traced back to the 1960s, when he played a key role in the cultural developments of the “Prague Spring” that were abruptly crushed by the Soviet-led occupation and political repression. His first novel, The Joke (Žert, 1967) was one of the first works in Czechoslovakia to question the ideological excesses of the early Communist period. In the wave of Western sympathy for the Czechs following the Soviet invasion, Kundera’s book was published in French and English, as well as other languages. However, his reaction when seeing these translations was one of shock: “In England, the publisher cut out all the reflective passages, eliminated the musicological chapters, changed the order of the parts, recomposed the novel. . . The shock of The Joke’s translations left a permanent scar on me” (1988: 121). Because of Kundera’s insistence on producing versions more faithful to his Czech originals, he gradually replaced the first French and English translations of his novels with revised editions that he supervised himself. Yet, as Michelle Woods has shown in her detailed comparison of Kundera’s novels in Czech, French, and English, he made repeated revisions of his Czech texts as well, thus bringing into question the whole idea of “fidelity” to an original. Perhaps the most extreme case is The Joke, which has gone through several versions in both Czech and English; most of his English translations were thoroughly revised in the 1990s. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the only one of his pre-1989 novels still in print in its original translation. In the case of “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” the practice of cultural translation can also be seen at the level of the text itself, which has a complex publication history. Originally written in French under the title “Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale,” Kundera’s essay first appeared in a Swedish translation in 1983. The French original was published in the journal Le Débat in November of that year. In

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spring 1984, the English translation of the essay by Edmund White (the only one of Kundera’s translators to be a noted novelist in his own right) appeared in two journals with two different titles (both based on the original French.) It appeared in Granta under the title “A Kidnapped West” and in the New York Review of Books under the title “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” by which the piece became more commonly known. The differences from the French to the English are substantial enough for the latter to be considered a revised version, and there is also a significant variation between the two English versions. These changes suggest that Kundera actively adapted his most influential essay for the Anglophone cultural context, much as he did in the better-known case of his novels, particularly with the addition and deletion of various footnotes. When comparing the French version to the two English translations, Kundera’s views of Bulgaria, Germany, Ukraine, and even the United States can be seen to shift considerably, presumably in accord with to the intended readership. The relationship between these versions also brings into relief the close relationship between two of Kundera’s most crucial themes at the height of his career: his insistence on redefining the cultural boundaries of Europe in defiance of then-prevailing political realities, and his increasing obsession with the fidelity of his translations. Lawrence Venuti has criticized Kundera’s stance on translation: “Kundera doesn’t want to recognize the linguistic and cultural differences that a translation must negotiate; he rather wants to preside over them by selecting the ones he most prefers” (1998: 6). Culture, for Kundera, is a way of resisting power on both sides of the Cold War divide; translation is a way of asserting creative control in a world where his key artistic tool, the Czech language, has virtually no value. Kundera has often described his work as a series of variations on a theme (one example being his collection of short stories, Laughable Loves.) However, there are few cases in his work so clear as “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (“Un Occident kidnappé”/ “A Kidnapped West”) where the differences in texts between languages are so marked that they can be seen as deliberate variations rather than straightforward translations of originals. Kundera creates a text that defies linguistic identities in a way that is analogous to his rejection of political borders.

Centro-Eurocentrism and its “others” Since the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, scholars have continued to acknowledge the importance of Kundera’s “The Tragedy of Central Europe” in articulating a new identity for the region, but they have also increasingly criticized what might be termed his “Centro-Eurocentrism,” his privileging of certain countries of the Eastern Bloc as closer to “Western civilization” than others. As Iver Neumann points out, “the language and thrust of the Central European project are similar to those of nationalism inasmuch as they try to turn the political field into a battleground between groups that are not only culturally but more often than not also ethnically defined” (159). Other scholars have criticized not only the divisive nature of the essay but also the



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vagueness of the new borders it proposes. The Balkan historian Maria Todorova has described Kundera’s essay as “melodramatic and, at times, outright racist but [its] sincere emotional appeal, alongside its excessive reductionism, explains the attention that it received.” She calls it “remarkable. . . that there was no mention of the Balkans whatsoever; the only opposition was Russia” (145). By taking away the familiar if confining context of “Eastern Europe,” Kundera had moved the borders of European culture without clearly specifying where the new boundaries were to be drawn. One of Kundera’s key arguments in “The Tragedy of Central Europe” is that Russians were historically seen by Central Europeans as “barbaric,” supporting his argument that the latter are actually Western. In the French original, he quotes Czesław Miłosz as calling Russians “barbarians,” but in the English version he softens this statement by shortening the paragraph (the bold highlighting, added for emphasis below, shows the lines cut from the original): Czeslav [sic] Milosz en parle dans son livre Une autre Europe: aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, les Moscovites apparaissent aux Polonais comme “des barbares contre qui on guerroyait sur les frontières lointaines. On ne s’intéressait pas spécialement à eux.... De cette époque où ils ne trouvent que le vide à l’est dérive chez les Polonais la conception d’une Russie située “à l’extérieur,” en dehors du monde.” Apparaissent comme “barbares” ceux qui représentent un autre univers. Les Russes le représentent pour les Polonais, toujours. (1983b: 8–9) In his book The Native Realm, Czeslaw Milosz speaks of the phenomenon: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Poles waged war against the Russians ‘along distant borders. No one was especially interested in the Russians. . . It was this experience, when the Poles found only a big void to the east, that engendered the Polish concept of a Russia situated “out there” – outside the world.’ (1984a: 100–101)

The French original is here far more definitive in its repudiation of Russia as a nonEuropean, barbaric “other.” The English version retains the concept of “distant borders” and the cultural “void” that Russia represented for the Poles, but stops short of the original conclusion that the Poles “always” saw the Russians as “another universe.” He concludes, however, with the idea that the nations of Central Europe see the Russian domination of the region as “an attack on their civilization. . . And the deep meaning of their resistance is the struggle to preserve their identity – or put another way, to preserve their Westernness” (1984a: 102). The French original follows with a reference to an earlier work on this theme: “Le texte le plus beau et le plus lucide que j’aie jamais lu sur la Russie en tant que civilisation particulière est celui de Cioran, intitulé La Russie et le virus de la liberté, publié dans son livre Histoire et utopie (1960)” [“The most beautiful and lucid text that I’ve ever read concerning Russia as a particular civilization is that of [Emil] Cioran, entitled Russia and the Virus of Liberty, published in his book History and Utopia (1960)”]1 (1983b: 10). Kundera’s mention of Cioran (another 1.

All translations from the French version are those of the present author.

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Central European intellectual who found exile in France, (see Cotter in the present volume) is one of his few direct references to Romania; the English translation removes this footnote and replaces it with a more general observation on Russian culture’s relationship to Western Europe. Kundera’s treatment of Bulgaria (more closely tied to the “East” through its Orthodox religion and Cyrillic alphabet) also varies between the original and the translation. Near the beginning of the French version, after describing the revolts in Budapest, Prague, and Poland from 1956 through 1970, Kundera claims that they would be “unthinkable” in Bulgaria: En effet, ces révoltes-là, soutenues par la totalité de la population, sont impensables en Russie. Mais elles sont impensables même en Bulgarie, pays qui, comme tout le monde sait, est la partie la plus stable du bloc communiste. Pourquoi? Parce que la Bulgarie fait partie, depuis ses origines, de la civilisation de l’Est, grâce à la religion orthodoxe, dont les premiers missionnaires étaient d’ailleurs bulgares. Les conséquences de la dernière guerre signifient donc pour les Bulgares un changement politique, certes, considérable et regrettable (les droits de l’homme y sont non moins bafoués qu’à Budapest), mais non pas ce choc des civilisations qu’elles répresentent pour les Tchèques, pour les Polonais, pour les Hongrois. (1983b: 5) [These revolts, supported by the total population, are unthinkable in Russia. But they are even unthinkable in Bulgaria, the country which, as everyone knows, is the most stable part of the Communist Bloc. Why? Because Bulgaria, since its origins, has shared in the civilization of the East, thanks to the Orthodox religion, of which the first missionaries were Bulgarian. The consequences of the last war thus meant for the Bulgarians a political change, certainly (human rights are no less flouted there than in Budapest) but not the shock of civilizations that it represented for the Czechs, for the Poles, for the Hungarians.]

This entire paragraph supports Kundera’s claim elsewhere that there is no unified “Slavic culture,” relegating Bulgaria, with its lack of democratic traditions, to the same position of “otherness” that Russia occupies throughout the essay. Yet this single direct reference to the Balkans in the essay disappeared when the English version was published (leading to Maria Todorova’s accusation, as noted above, that this key region had been overlooked altogether.) His reference to a “shock of civilizations” anticipates Samuel Huntington’s formulation of a “clash of civilizations” that became highly influential in the post-Communist period. To touch closer to home, the French version of Kundera’s essay continually refers to Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians, but consistently overlooks the Slovaks. Kundera begins the second section of his essay with the evocative rhetorical question: “In fact, what does Europe mean to a Hungarian, a Czech, a Pole?” (1984a: 95). In the fifth section, in trying to explain the “disappearance” of the Central European nations, he explains, “The history of the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians has been turbulent and fragmented” (1984a: 103). In the earlier French version of the latter



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sentence, he once again refers only to “Les Polonais, les Tchèques, les Hongrois”; the Slovaks were seemingly added specifically for the English version (1983b: 10). Later, he explains the shifting fortunes of these national histories by contrasting the height of Czech culture in the fourteenth century when “Charles University in Prague had already brought together intellectuals. . . who were Czech, Austrian, Bavarian, Saxon, Polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and Rumanian with the germ of the idea of a multinational community in which each nation would have the right of its own language” (1984b: 106). He contrasts this situation with the nineteenth-century “national struggles (of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Croats, the Slovenes, the Rumanians, the Jews) [which] brought into opposition nations that, insulated, egoistic, closed-off. . . [had shared] the experience of a nation that chooses between its existence and its non-existence.” (1984b: 107) Once again, the French edition omits the Slovaks from both lists (1983b: 13). In the case of the fourteenth century, it is anachronistic to talk of a Slovak nation, thus its omission from the first list is understandable. However, the “national struggle” of the Slovaks in the nineteenth century was just as fervent as that of the Czechs. One might even say that in thus overlooking the Czechs’ partner republic, Kundera is guilty of the same oversight of which he accuses the West in its attitude toward Central Europe. He seems to have become conscious of this between the original French publication and the two English versions, thus adding the references to the Slovaks. Kundera’s treatment of Germany also differs somewhat between the French version and the English translation, emphasizing the “dramatic content and historical impact” of the “revolts in Central Europe,” all of which “involved almost the entire population” (1984a: 96). In the French version, he adds a footnote referring to one of the earliest popular revolts in the Eastern Bloc, that of the workers of East Berlin in 1953. This cannot be compared to Budapest and Prague, however: “Le destin de l’Allemagne de l’Est a un caractère spécifique. . . elle, n’est qu’un morceau d’Allemagne dont l’existence n’est nullement menacée” [“The destiny of East Germany has a specific character. . . it is nothing but a piece of Germany, whose existence is not threatened in the least”]. Among the occupying Warsaw Pact troops, Kundera claims, the Bulgarians and East Germans cooperated fully with the Russians, while he cites “des dizaines d’histoires sur les Polonais et les Hongrois qui faisaient l’impossible pour donner à voir leur désaccord avec l’occupation et la sabotaient franchement” [“dozens of stories about Poles and Hungarians who did the impossible in showing their disagreement with the occupation and blatantly sabotaging it”]. In addition, the help that the Austrians offered the Czechs, and the “anti-Soviet furor” in Yugoslavia after the invasion “fit émerger l’espace traditionnel de l’Europe centrale avec une frappante clarté” [“brought the traditional space of Central Europe to the surface with striking clarity”] (1983b: 5). In this footnote, more explicitly than he does elsewhere in the piece, Kundera defines his “Central Europe” in terms of “small nations” rather than languages, including Austria but not Germany, and even Yugoslavia (or more specifically, Slovenia and Croatia.) There is also a telling element of moral judgement; the true

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“Central Europeans” are those (the Czechs, the Poles, and the Hungarians) who most actively resisted Russian domination. Kundera not only removes or changes footnotes, but also adds ones to the English that were not in the original French. For example, he asserts Russia’s determination “to transform every nation of its empire (the Ukrainians, the Belorussians [sic], the Armenians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and others) into a single Russian people (or, as is more commonly expressed in this age of generalized verbal mystification, into a ‘single Soviet people.’)” In the English version, he adds the following footnote: “One of the great European nations (there are nearly forty million Ukrainians) is slowly disappearing. And this enormous event, which is almost unbelievable, is something Europe doesn’t realize!” (1984a: 99). By broadening his scope to include Ukraine, whose capital Kiev is inseparable from the traditions of Russian culture, Kundera moves his “imaginary borders” deep into Soviet territory. This list is also symptomatic of Kundera’s Eurocentrism. It includes most of Russia’s subjugated European nations, but dismisses the rest of the Soviet Union with the single and telling word “others,” as if the Central Asian (and largely Turkic) republics from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan were not equally oppressed by Russian cultural hegemony. By contrast, in a 1986 essay, Václav Havel laments Western indifference toward the 1980 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which fills him with “total disgust and a sense of limitless hopelessness,” and suggests that he had shared the Afghans’ “specific historical experience” of Soviet tanks rolling into his homeland, despite the vast cultural differences between Prague and Kabul (184). Returning to Bhabha’s sense of cultural translation, the “otherness” of these mostly Islamic cultures within Kundera’s argument implies the “cultural supremacy” of Central Europe, rather than a sense of “solidarity” for their shared experience as small nations under Soviet domination.

Small nations and the relevance of culture In the passage in “The Tragedy of Central Europe” where Kundera defines the small nation, he develops the provocative idea that “the destiny of Central Europe anticipates the destiny of Europe in general, and its culture assumes an enormous relevance.” He adds, “It’s enough to read the greatest Central European novels:” Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Hašek’s Švejk, and Kafka’s “novelistic visions. . . which speak to us of a world without memory, of a world that comes after historic time” (1984a: 109). In the French original, Kundera adds a footnote here referring the reader to a book by Pascal Lainé, Si j’ose dire (If I Dare to Say) for its insights into the Central European novel. In this work, Lainé suggests that Central European authors (offering Musil, Svevo, Kafka, Hašek, Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, and Kundera as examples), despite writing in different languages, shared the experience of feeling as “more or less foreigners” toward the Habsburg state, and of living as “minorities” in a society where the political authority was in contrast with their national identity



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(1983b: 39). In “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” Kundera has a similar list representing interwar Central European literature: “With the work of Kafka and Hašek, Prague created the great counterpart in the novel to the work of the Viennese Musil and Broch. . . And in Poland the great trinity of Gombrowicz, Schulz and Witkiewicz anticipated the European modernism of the 1950s, notably the so-called theatre of the absurd” (1984a: 105–6). In this instance, Kundera does not explicitly add himself as the heir to this tradition (but it is notable that five of the seven writers are identical to those in Lainé’s list). In the English version of “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” the reference to Pascal Lainé has disappeared. It is replaced by a far more general observation: “With this great circle of Central European writers, with Kafka, Hašek, Broch, and Musil, a new post-Proustian, post-Joycean aesthetic of the novel, it seems to me, arises in Europe” (1984a: 109). By substituting this footnote, Kundera is doing two subtle but significant things here: first, he is in effect marking the French original as a “local” text (for French-language readers) and the English translation as the “international” one (contradicting his own policy for his novels, in which the French version is more “authentic” than the English). Second he is marking the beginning of his shift from a largely political (i.e., public) definition of Central Europe to a primarily aesthetic (i.e., private) one, which would come to dominate his view of the region by the time he published his essay collection The Art of the Novel. At the heart of his argument on “European unity,” there is even a difference between the British and American versions of the essay (i.e., “A Kidnapped West” and “The Tragedy of Central Europe”) that subtly changes the entire perspective of the piece. In “A Kidnapped West” (the Granta version) he adds a lengthy footnote distinguishing the United States from Europe. This role of culture “as the embodiment of the supreme values by which Europeans understand themselves, define themselves, identify themselves as European, does not seem to me to apply entirely to America.” He goes on to claim that: there are no such figures as Descartes or Cervantes, Pascal or Rembrandt in the very foundations of America. For a long time its culture remained provincial and, most important, without any representativeness. Mozart embodied the very spirit of Austria, just as Dvořak symbolized the Czech homeland. . . Faulkner. . . could never claim such a ‘representativeness’ for himself. That’s why America cannot respond as Europe does with ‘a strong sense of distress’ to the passage from the age of culture to another era in which ‘culture bows out.’ (1984a: 110)

In the following footnote, he compares journalists to writers and, railing against the growth of the mass media, notes “A European is more sensitive to this change than an American.” Setting Kundera’s assertions about “representativeness” aside, it is interesting to note that in “Tragedy” the first of these footnotes was entirely deleted, and the second one was drastically cut. Presumably Kundera realized that it would be counterproductive to publish an essay directed at a primarily American readership, while claiming that America “cannot respond as Europe does” to the disappearance of culture

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as a “supreme value.” Although this marginalization of American society from questions of European identity may have pleased many of Kundera’s French readers, it does not occur in “Un Occident kidnappé.” Thus, it was presumably added for the primarily, but not solely, British readership of Granta. What is puzzling is that on the previous page Kundera emphasizes the “enormous relevance” of Central European culture with the observation: “Actually, in our modern world where power has a tendency to become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few big countries, all European nations run the risk of becoming small nations and sharing their fate.” He accompanies this warning for the larger European nations with a footnote mentioning the University of Michigan (where he had received an honorary doctorate in 1982) and its “very important” periodical of Central European culture, Cross Currents. Thus within the space of three pages, Kundera is sending a mixed message. While the United States supposedly does not share the “strong sense of distress” to the “era in which ‘culture bows out,’” he recognizes nonetheless that some of the most significant work in preserving and promoting Central European culture in the 1980s, transcending national and linguistic boundaries, was taking place in the American college town of Ann Arbor.2 This minor but telling discrepancy in the two translations is a fascinating insight into the way that Kundera’s concept of Central Europe’s “small nations” has evolved out of his focus on Czech national existence. In the final discrepancy between the two English versions, Kundera reveals his increasing attention to his translations, and hints at disagreements with his translator: “We have had a bit of a problem translating the word ‘revue.’ A revue is a periodical. . . run not by journalists but by people of culture. . . it deals with cultural questions and comments on social events from the cultural point of view. . . The disappearance of these revues or their complete marginalization is, in my opinion, the sign that ‘culture is bowing out’” (1984a: 116). Yet on the back cover of that same issue of Granta was a quote from Malcolm Bradbury: “Nearly every movement in Britain in the twentieth century has managed to find a forum in the place we normally turn to for such things, which is the literary magazine. . . If one were looking, as writer or reader, for such a magazine, it would be hard at this moment to avoid the claims of Granta.” In the American context, a similarly influential “forum” was (and remains) the New York Review of Books. In other words, the two publications which brought Kundera’s essay to world readers, more than the French original had done, were examples of the type of review which he claims had “disappeared.” Tellingly, this footnote itself disappeared between the British “Kidnapped West” and the American “Tragedy of Central Europe.”

2. Incidentally, the essay’s translator Edmund White was a graduate of the University of Michigan.



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In and out of context: The impossibility of tracing borders Rather than returning to Czechoslovakia after 1989, Kundera not only remained in France but began to write his novels entirely in French, abandoning his native language at precisely the time his homeland began to rejoin the West. He took the final step of self-translation, following such fellow Slavic exiles as Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov. Unlike those writers, however, Kundera made this change relatively late in his career, and none of his French-language novels have matched the commercial or critical success of his Czech novels. Nearly twenty years after the Velvet Revolution, not all of his Czech-language exile novels have been republished for Czech readers; astonishingly, The Unbearable Lightness of Being did not appear in the Czech Republic until 2006, and none of his subsequent French-language novels have appeared there. Kundera’s attitude toward Czech translations of these works is contradictory: although he has not translated them into Czech himself, he also refuses to have them translated by anyone else. He also made it clear that he was not going to make all of his French-language essays, including “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” available to Czech readers. When The Joke was republished in 1991, Kundera wrote an afterword rejecting “all those essays meant to explain to the foreign public the essence of the Czech situation,” with the exception of the essays he included in The Art of the Novel. He claims that he had written these essays “more to serve my countrymen’s cause than to discover and say anything new; with those essays, I did not wish to join in the Czech literary debate and therefore I do not intend to translate them into Czech or republish them” (Misurella 163–64). Even his three essay collections, The Art of the Novel (1988), Testaments Betrayed (1995), and The Curtain (2006), perhaps his most significant writing of the past twenty years, have not appeared in book form in Czech. Some of the essays have, however, appeared individually in Czech journals and even in shorter volumes that have no corresponding editions in other language. By “disowning” essays such as “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” Kundera has effectively made it impossible to establish one version as definitive. However, if there is no true “original” text, it also becomes impossible to draw definitive boundaries for Central Europe, this “realm” defined not by political borders but by a “common tradition.” One criteria for an authoritative version would be to see which one had been used as the basis for further translations. Yet the German translation (1984d) is based on the French version, while the Czech translation (1985) is based on the English version (although it was published in Paris). What could be considered the true original: the French or the English one (and in the latter case, the British or American version)? Neither the writer’s native language (Czech), nor the text’s original language (French), nor its first language of publication (Swedish) can be considered fully “authentic,” just as neither of its English translations can be called entirely authoritative. Through its variations and omissions, this essay which so effectively challenged the political assumptions of the 1980s also calls into question the customary connection between a

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text and its national or linguistic context. Like Kundera himself, it is neither Czech nor French, but something in between, even though it (like its author) gained its greatest success in English translation. In his 2007 essay collection The Curtain, Milan Kundera returns to the question of “Central Europe,” suggesting that the only way to fully understand literary works is to see them not only in terms of their “small” national context and the “large” world context but also, most importantly, in the “median” regional context. For Czech literature, of course, the “median” context is Central Europe, but as he concedes, it resists a simple definition: Central Europe: What is it? The whole collection of small nations between two powers, Russia and Germany. . . All right, but which nations do we mean? Does it include the three Baltic countries? And what about Romania, tugged toward the East by the Orthodox Church, toward the West by its Romance language? Or Austria, which for a long while represented the political center of that ensemble?. . . Is it true that the borders of Central Europe are impossible to trace in any exact, lasting way? It is indeed! Those nations have never been masters of either their own destinies or their borders. . . They were kin to one another not through will, not through fellow-feeling or linguistic proximity, but by reason of similar experience, by reason of common historical situations that brought them together, at different times, in different configurations, and within shifting, never definitive borders. (2006: 45–46)

The rhetorical questions Kundera raises at the beginning of this passage seem to mock those, both supporters and critics, who have attempted to use his essay to create a definitive new map for this “imaginary realm.” Kundera’s insistence on breaking down the barriers between Communist and Western Europe seems to be at odds with his continuing redefinition of his personal “canon” and his rejection of those works that fall outside it. Yet rather than accusing him of inconsistency, we can see his selective use of translation as a struggle against those who wanted to use his work for their own political aims. Milan Kundera’s attempts to impose absolute control over the translations of his works have a distinct resonance with the issues of borders, territory, and exile that have shaped his life and career, and more generally the political situation of Cold War Europe. Over twenty-five years since the publication of “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and his native Czechoslovakia, and the entrance of some of their successor states into the European Union, Kundera’s key belief in the “shifting borders” of the region seems keenly prescient. Yet even for these nations on the “borderlines of history,” as this case illustrates, there are limits to solidarity, and “cultural translation” can draw new boundaries even as it helps to erase the old ones.



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Works cited Bhabha, Homi. 1995. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Havel, Václav. 1986. Living in Truth. London: Faber and Faber. Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Touchstone. Kundera, Milan. 1983a. “Ett kidnappat västerland, eller Centraleuropas tragedi.” Ord a Bild, 4: 3–19. –—. 1983b. “Un occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe Centrale,” Le Débat, 27: 3–22. –—. 1984a. “A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out.” Granta 11: 95–118 –—. 1984b. “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books (26 April) 33–38. –—. 1984c. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Heim. New York: Harper & Row. –—. 1984d. “Un Occident kidnappé oder Die Tragödie Zentraleuropas,” Kommune, 7: 43–52. –—. 1985. “Únos Západu,” 150.000 Slov, 4. –—. 1988. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Harper & Row. –—. 1991. Žert. Brno: Atlantis. –—. 2007. The Curtain. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Harper Collins. Lainé, Pascal. 1982. Si j’ose dire: Entretiens avec Jérôme Garcin. Paris: Mercure. Misurella, Fred. 1993. Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Neumann, Iver. 2004. Uses of the Other: The “East” in European Identity Formation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sabatos, Charles. 2008. “Criticism and Destiny: Kundera and Havel on the Legacy of 1968.” Europe-Asia Studies, 10: 1829–1847. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation. New York: Routledge. Woods, Michelle. 2006. Paths in the Fog: Translating Milan Kundera. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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Nation and translation Literary translation and the shaping of modern Ukrainian culture Vitaly Chernetsky

Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA It has been argued that Ukraine stands out among Slavic/East European nations due to the extent to which literary translation has played a pivotal role in shaping the modern national identity. Although vernacular translation stood at the root of many national literary traditions, the case of Ukraine, as Maksym Strikha argues in his recent history of Ukrainian literary translation, differs from its neighbors due to the nation’s lengthy colonial status and the long-standing policy of bans and restrictions Russian imperial authorities promulgated against the use of the Ukrainian language. Building in part on the scholarly paradigms developed by Western scholars who bring translation studies into dialogue with postcolonial theory, the present article proceeds from a critical summary of Strikha’s narrative and its arguments to a discussion of the ways in which some of the leading contemporary Ukrainian authors (among them Yuri Andrukhovych, Volodymyr Dibrova, Oksana Zabuzhko, and Andrii Bondar) combine their activities as writers and literary translators, striving to take Ukrainian culture in a new direction in the context of postcolonial independence and engagement with the cultural aspects of globalization.

Ukrainian translation and its contexts The questions of the socio-cultural function of translation have been receiving particularly significant attention in Western translation studies for a couple of decades now.1 This intensified focus has been associated with the general “cultural turn” in the study of both literature and society, and in particular with the prodigious growth of translation scholarship informed by a dialogue with postcolonial criticism. Yet it can be argued that within this general turn, the national cultures of the former Soviet 1. The move of these questions to the forefront of scholarly attention is associated with the influential collection Translation, History and Culture (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990).

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Vitaly Chernetsky

Union and Eastern Europe have so far received relatively limited attention (although we are fortunate to have Maurice Friedberg’s 1997 monograph, Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History). This relative lack of attention is all the more surprising since in the national cultures of Eastern Europe, as in many other vernacular literary traditions, the role of translation is hard to overestimate. My focus in the present essay will be on Ukraine, an East European nation that, despite its considerable size and population, is still in many respects a cultural terra incognita for most Westerners. It has been argued that even among its fellow Slavic and East European nations Ukraine stands out due to the extent to which literary translation has played a pivotal role in shaping its modern national identity. Although vernacular translation stood at the root of many national literary traditions, the case of Ukraine, as the Ukrainian scholar and translator Maksym Strikha argues in his tellingly titled recent monograph Ukraïns’kyi khudozhnii pereklad: Mizh literaturoiu i natsiietvorenniam (Ukrainian Literary Translation: Between Literature and Nation-Making, 2006), differs from its neighbors due to the nation’s lengthy colonial status and the long-standing policy of bans and restrictions against the use of the Ukrainian language promulgated by Russian imperial authorities.2 These conditions also help explain why literary translators, such as Hryhorii Kochur (1908–1994) and Mykola Lukash (1919–1988), were at the forefront of the dissident movement in Ukraine in the 1960s–1970s. Strikha’s volume is the first book-length history of Ukrainian literary translation in any language, and its subtitle spells out the author’s choice of emphasis. Strikha argues that Ukrainian literary translation was not a form of asserting cultural power or escaping direct involvement in politically compromised activities, but a conscious project of resistance, and he traces this project from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the Soviet era. However, the epilogue of Strikha’s book on the situation in the post-independence years does not tackle the changing fortunes of literary translation in today’s Ukraine in a substantive way. In this essay, I will engage in a critical dialogue with Strikha’s seminal book and other notable recent critical studies of Ukrainian literary translation, and then discuss the ways in which some of the leading Ukrainian authors of the post-independence era combine their activities as writers and literary translators to take Ukrainian culture in a new direction in the context of postcolonial independence and engagement with the cultural aspects of globalization. Before turning specifically to the case of Ukraine, however, I would like to sketch out some of the premises and parallels that have informed my approach. One of them concerns the need for greater attention to translation studies projects focused on the target languages and cultures other than the major Western ones. Even within the now prodigiously growing field of postcolonial translation studies, a lion’s share of scholarship, from the seminal contributions by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 2. In the main text of the article, the commonly used English transliterations of Ukrainian and Russian authors’ names are provided; however, in the bibliography, the Library of Congress transliteration is used so that readers may consult library database records.



Nation and translation 

and Kwame Anthony Appiah to the numerous recent monograph and collections, focuses on translations into English and other Western languages.3 However, when one focuses on translation into a non-hegemonic target language, a whole new set of concerns comes to the fore. For non-hegemonic languages in particular, I would argue, the following observation by Gideon Toury rings particularly true: Semiotically . . . translation is as good as initiated by the target culture. In other words, the starting point is always one of a certain deficiency in the latter . . . . [T]he more persuasive rationale is not the mere existence of something in another culture/language, but rather the observation that something is “missing” in the target culture which should have been there and which, luckily, already exists elsewhere. (Toury 1995: 27)

There have been several notable studies of how translation has contributed to a project of anti-imperialist resistance and reshaping of the national identity, with one of the best-known examples coming from late nineteenth – early twentieth century China.4 Lawrence Venuti, in an insightful recent essay entitled “Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities,” also brings up the case of late nineteenth-century China, along with Germany during the Napoleonic Wars and twentieth-century Catalonia. In all three cases, Venuti asserts, the translators “intended their translations to form national identities by soliciting their readers’ identification with a particular national discourse that was articulated in relation to hegemonic foreign nations” (Venuti 2005: 187). Additionally, in all three cases [f]oreign texts are chosen because they fall into particular genres and address particular themes while excluding other genres and themes that are seen as unimportant for the formation of a national identity; translation strategies draw on particular dialects, registers, and styles while excluding others that are also in use; and translators target particular audiences with their work, excluding other constituencies. (Venuti 2005: 189–90)

The positions of Germany vis-à-vis France during the Napoleonic era and China visà-vis Western powers in the aftermath of the Opium Wars were certainly precarious. The case of Catalonia, however, provides a particularly instructive parallel for Ukraine. The Catalan language was overshadowed for centuries by its more powerful neighbors, Castilian Spanish and French, yet it thrived in the late medieval period and again beginning with the national revival in the nineteenth century. Much like Ukrainian, the Catalan language endured periods when its public use, including specifically the publication of translations into Catalan, was expressly forbidden, and the continuity of the national tradition depended on diasporic efforts. While there are important differences 3. See Spivak 2004, Appiah 2004, Niranjana 1992, Bassnett and Trivedi 1999, Tymoczko 1999, Simon and St.-Pierre 2000, and numerous others. 4. See Schwartz 1964, and Kenan 2002, esp. 164–66.

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between the two cases from a historical and political point of view, the similarities suggest that attention to some aspects of the Catalan case might be illuminating for Ukraine as well. Modern-era Catalan nationalism has been a defensive one, developed in opposition to Castilian, the hegemonic language of the Spanish state. Yet within this overall paradigm there were very different strategies chosen at different times by different practitioners. As with Ukraine, the early twentieth century was one clear period of a translation boom, whose leading representative in Catalan literature was Josep Carner (1884–1970). In a 1907 essay occasioned by the publication of Catalan translations of Shakespeare, Carner proclaimed his vision for the Catalan translation effort: In order for Catalan to become abundant, complex, flexible, elegant, it is necessary that the masters of every period and every country be honored with versions in our language and, in gratitude, endow it with every quality of expression and differentiation that it needs. In order to make Catalan literature complete, essential, illustrious, our spirit must be enriched with every fundamental creation.5

Therefore, Carner placed particular emphasis on translating aesthetically innovative and challenging texts, and had a penchant for works abounding in fantasy and humor (in contrast to the somber realism of much of nineteenth-century Catalan writing). Carner’s translations, according to Venuti, were “enjoyably readable, but [with] noticeable departures from current usage . . . he devised innovative strategies that resulted in a richly heterogeneous Catalan. His lexicon deliberately mixed archaisms, learned diction, dialectalisms, and neologisms, at times deviating from the registers and styles of foreign texts, at others resorting to literalisms or calques of foreign words or phrases” (Venuti 2005: 196). The translations, especially during the more repressive periods (such as Carner’s version of Alice in Wonderland published in 1927) also included encoded messages of anti-hegemonic resistance. While thoroughly enjoyed by his Catalan readers, Carner’s translations stressed experimentation and innovation in their approach. By contrast with Carner, the activities of Joan Sales (1912–1983), a major translator from a younger generation, took place during the repressive rule of Franco’s regime, in exile during the ban on Catalan that was enforced from 1939 to 1959, and in his publishing activity after the lifting of the ban in the 1960s. Sales’s approach to translation was more populist and conservative; for his translation projects, he chose primarily realist novels and sought to render them in “living Catalan,” so that the reader “might come to forget that he is reading a translation.”6 Leaving aside for the moment the rather puzzling fact that this pronouncement was made in a preface to Sales’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov, hardly an easy and lucid work, the translator’s strategy appears to have been trying to engage the maximum possible readership by 5.

Quoted in Venuti 2005: 194.

6. Quoted in Venuti 2005: 198.



Nation and translation 

making the texts transparently accessible, their foreignness minimized and made invisible. These two key figures of Catalan literary translation thus epitomize the experimental and the smoothing-down approaches to their project, and their choices stem from the specific historical, political, and social contexts they were facing. As we shall see shortly, in the case of Ukraine some of the choices made in the service of developing and enriching the national cultural identity were no less diverse, indeed to the point of mutual contradiction.

Translation and Ukraine’s cultural history prior to Soviet rule The seminal role played by translation in forming national identities has long been acknowledged, with Martin Luther’s 1534 translation of the Bible a classic example of translation elevating the spoken vernacular to the status of a national literary language, which in turn establishes a standardized literary norm. However, a contemporaneous shift in the linguistic development of Ukraine did not occur: the influential Ostroh Bible of 1581, which could have played a role analogous to that of Luther’s Bible, was printed in Church Slavonic, while the manuscript Peresopnyts’ke Gospel of 1561, although its language was significantly closer to the local spoken vernacular, did not achieve a comparable influence at the time, and its linguistic importance was recognized only in the 1830s. Thus on the territory of Ukraine until the end of the eighteenth century, the local written standard was the so-called knyzhna mova (‘book language’), with many elements of Church Slavonic, Polish, and other influences which differed significantly from the spoken vernacular in all its regional variations. The text that began the history of modern vernacular Ukrainian literature was Ivan Kotliarevs’kyi’s Eneïda, a travestied translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. The first three parts of this work were published in 1798, and therefore a translation, albeit an unusual one, came to be the foundation of modern standard Ukrainian language and Ukrainian literature. Kotliarevs’kyi’s work has remained one of the most influential texts of Ukrainian literature, much loved by multiple generations of readers for its lucidity and humor, as well as for the richness of its vocabulary. However, the immense popularity of his book has also produced some unintended consequences, as many educated readers, both in Ukraine and abroad, came to believe that while Ukrainian vernacular literature was well suited to comedic narratives, it lacked the means to address lofty and serious topics. While such claims about any literary language would strike us as preposterous from the vantage point of today, this opinion was widely held for several decades, and forced several Ukrainian authors to seek to disprove it. The rich, diverse and powerful writing of Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), who came to be regarded as Ukraine’s national poet, eventually rendered such claims moot, at least for those who were able – and willing – to read in Ukrainian. Shevchenko’s accomplishments also dwarfed the literary output of several authors who came between him and Kotliarevs’kyi, although in their time they too made a very important contribution.

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Vitaly Chernetsky

To understand better the choices made by translators, both in terms of the works selected and the linguistic resources employed, it is critical to consider their intended audiences, as Strikha rightly notes (Strikha 2006: 8). In the early decades of the nineteenth century, literacy levels in Ukraine were but a fraction of those some two centuries earlier (in the seventeenth century, Ukrainians enjoyed one of the highest literacy rates in Europe, but over the course of Russian colonial rule their literacy levels plummeted, becoming one of the lowest on the continent). The only possible addressees were literate Ukrainians, and this community at the time was primarily comprised civil servants, country squires, and parish priests. As products of their era’s educational system, virtually all of them were perfectly capable of reading translations into either Russian or Polish, and most could also read French and Latin. Thus when in the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century Ukrainian authors produced translations of Virgil, Horace, Pushkin, and Mickiewicz, their goal was not to bring these texts to a new audience, but rather to make their audience appreciate the capacity of their native language to express these familiar texts. In other words, it was an argument for strengthening their national aspirations. In this respect, the activity of the Ukrainian translators paralleled those in many other Eastern and Central European nations of their time. Indeed, there is much in common between their efforts and those of early nineteenth-century German translators, who were busy rendering Homer, Plato, and Shakespeare into German (see Venuti 2005: 187–91). In this respect I disagree with Venuti’s argument that the identity formed by those German translations “was less national than learned and bourgeois” (190) and that by comparison, “the social impact of the Chinese translators’ work was much more consequential because it was extremely popular, extending beyond the academic and official elite” (191). For the lower strata of the German population, there was no danger of losing their linguistic identity, while many representatives of the nation’s elite over the course of the eighteenth century switched to French as their main language of communication (as did most of continental Europe’s aristocracy, including as far east as Russia). Similarly, the Ukrainian translators, just like their Czech, Hungarian, and numerous other East European counterparts, sought to bring the educated strata of their societies back to their native language. Last but not least, there is nothing inherently bourgeois about producing intellectually challenging translations of ancient Greek and Latin authors, and Venuti’s use of this label acquires sinister overtones for a historian of Ukrainian translation, because this was precisely the accusation leveled against the Ukrainian translators of classical authors by strident Soviet critics during the 1920s–1930s – and most of these translators went on to be brutally murdered by Stalin’s security services. Turning back to early nineteenth-century Ukraine, however, we would find that the local translations, as epitomized by Petro Hulak-Artemovs’kyi’s rendering of Horace’s odes (pub. 1827), continued the line of travestied translations begun by Kotliarevs’kyi. While their success is not comparable with that of Kotliarevs’kyi’s version of The Aeneid, they came to be appreciated by a very broad stratum of society – yet



Nation and translation 

they also reinforced the stereotype of Ukrainian as a “crude,” comedic language. These translations, like Ievhen Hrebinka’s translation of Pushkin’s narrative poem Poltava published in 1836, would be viewed quite negatively by many representatives of later generations of Ukrainian translators and critics, but there have also been attempts to reclaim them, and Strikha appears to be in solidarity with these efforts, arguing that to appreciate these travestied translations one needs to bear in mind their target audience of fellow early nineteenth-century educated Ukrainians. In a similar vein, George Grabowicz, the leading Ukrainian literature specialist in the West, has argued that these early nineteenth-century Ukrainian texts (both the original writings and the translations) played the subversive role of “masked speech” of a colonial subject, sharply differentiating between the actual author and the feigned simplicity of the narrator persona (Grabowicz 2003: 291–305). While the controversy surrounding the travestied texts does not show signs of abating, we should acknowledge the tremendous influence these texts have played, notably in informing the style, structure, and tone of Gogol’s Ukrainian-themed stories, which were for many generations the leading literary venue for familiarizing broader circles of readers with Ukrainian cultural mores. Despite the dominance of travestied comedic texts in Ukrainian letters in the early decades of the nineteenth century, already by the 1830s we see successful attempts at developing other literary registers. Strikha draws particular attention to the translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s sonnet “Akkerman Steppe” (“Stepy akermańskie”) published anonymously in 1830 and usually attributed to the Ukrainian poet Levko Borovykovs’kyi, arguing that this text displays all the signs of a translation congenial to the tone and style of the original (Strikha 2006: 63–64). Within just a few years, with the arrival of Taras Shevchenko on the Ukrainian literary scene in the late 1830s and the publication of his first book of poetry in 1840, the debates on whether Ukrainianlanguage writing was capable of a diversity of styles and speech registers had ceased. Amid the first flourish of Ukrainian-language almanacs in the early 1840s we see a wide range of translated texts, produced by authors guided by principles similar to those articulated for the German language by Friedrich Schleiermacher, who argued that the language “can thrive in all of its freshness and completely develop its own power only by means of the most many-sided contacts with what is foreign.”7 Renderings of poetry by Byron, Pushkin, and Mickiewicz appeared side by side with translations of newly discovered medieval epics – some of them, like the Czech Královédvorský Manuscript, were later proven to be forgeries, but at the time of those translations they were still considered to be authentic. Additionally, during this time the Ukrainian vernacular revival spread also into Galicia, the region of Ukraine ruled by the Habsburgs since 1772 – and in just a few short decades, this region would become the center of Ukrainian publishing, as increasingly severe restrictions were promulgated in the Russian Empire. 7.

Quoted in Venuti 2005: 187.

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Vitaly Chernetsky

In Shevchenko’s œuvre, translations proper occupy a relatively small part (into this category we might include his verse renditions of several Psalms and other passages from the Bible, as well as fragments of the Medieval Russian epic The Tale of Igor’s Campaign). However, translation projects occupied a central role in the work of Shevchenko’s sometime friend, sometime rival Panteleimon Kulish (1819–1897). Kulish’s accomplishments included designing the first modern Ukrainian orthography, writing the first Ukrainian-language historical novel, and starting the first Ukrainianlanguage periodical in the Russian Empire. Yet translation was invariably one of his central preoccupations, as testified by an 1857 letter to a fellow Ukrainian intellectual, where Kulish remarked, We [the Ukrainians] enriched Muscovite speech with words that they, given their scholarly backwardness [at the time of Russian annexation of Eastern Ukraine in the seventeenth century] did not possess. Now we need to claim back what is ours – never mind that Pushkin and others have since explored our territory . . . I have just translated into our language Canto 1 of Childe Harold as if there were no Russian language in existence, only ours and English.8

Although he did translate Byron and German Romantic poets, Kulish’s most monumental and long-term projects were his translations of Shakespeare and the Bible. Yet by the time he embarked on these ambitious projects, the literary and social contexts of his work had changed dramatically. The new flourishing of Ukrainian letters in the late 1850s – early 1860s came to an abrupt halt with the adoption of the so-called Valuev Circular of 1863, named for the then Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire. The circular prohibited the publication of any educational and religious materials in Ukrainian, thus targeting precisely the efforts of the Ukrainian intellectuals aimed at increasing the literacy and national consciousness of the broader strata of Ukrainian society. Then in 1876, Alexander II signed the so-called Ems Edict, which specifically banned the publication of translations into Ukrainian, as well as the importation of Ukrainian-language publications from abroad; additionally, the edict banned Ukrainian-language theater performances, and the printing of musical scores with Ukrainian text. The only Ukrainian texts that were still allowed for publication were historical documents and belles letters, but only in Russian transliteration. Simultaneously, the Russian government began financial and other assistance to Russophile publications in Austrian-ruled Galicia. The ban on Ukrainian-language publications, with minor modifications adopted in 1881, survived until 1905.9 The initial consequences of these restrictive measures on Ukrainian cultural life were devastating, as numerous cultural organizations shrank dramatically or were 8. Quoted in Strikha 2006: 10. All translations from the Ukrainian are mine unless noted otherwise (VC). 9. For more on these bans and their consequences, see Savchenko 1970, Miller 2003, and Chapters I and II of Shevelov 1989.



Nation and translation 

closed down, and the annual number of Ukrainian-language publications plummeted to the low single digits. Yet these restrictions also galvanized Ukrainian activities in Galicia and among the émigrés in Western Europe. Even in the Russian-ruled territory, many writers and translators continued their work, and many of their texts successfully made it to publishing venues in the West, and under the fairly liberal conditions of Habsburg rule Galicia became a lively center of Ukrainian-language publication of both books and periodicals. Although the timing of the Valuev Circular suggests that it was in part a reaction to the Polish uprising of 1863, brutally suppressed by the imperial Russian authorities, Strikha suggests (see Strikha 2006: 101–106) that the more direct cause was the Ukrainian vernacular translation of the New Testament completed in 1861 by Pylyp Morachevs’kyi, a law-abiding civil servant of aristocratic background who sought approval from the Russian Orthodox Church (denied), and then the Russian Academy of Sciences (granted). Yet the academy’s approval proved counterproductive, causing alarm within the imperial bureaucracy. As a consequence, the authorities insisted in particular that all Ukrainian-language religious publications be banned (the use of Ukrainian in sermons, as well as the Ukrainian redaction of Church Slavonic, had been prohibited since the 1720s – see Shevelov 1989: 5). Morachevs’kyi’s translations of the four Gospels were printed, with the church’s official sanction, only after the 1905 repeal of the ban on Ukrainian-language publications, and long after the translator’s death. The first complete translation of the Bible into Ukrainian was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1903, the result of more than thirty years of efforts by Kulish, as well as by the noted Galician Ukrainian intellectual, Ivan Puliui (a.k.a. Johann Puluj), and the writer Ivan Nechui-Levyts’kyi. Kulish and Puliui began their translation projects independently, but after meeting each other in 1869 in Vienna they joined their efforts, and their translation of the four Gospels was privately printed in Vienna in 1871; the full New Testament came out in 1880. This second edition received the approval of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which aided in its distribution and released a new edition in 1887. Unfortunately, the only complete manuscript of the translation of the Old Testament perished in a fire at Kulish’s country home in 1885. However, the aging writer restarted the project, and completed thirty-two of the books of the Old Testament by the time of his death, with Puliui and Nechui-Levyts’kyi finishing the project. This translation of the Bible was reprinted many times (although only once, in 1928, on Soviet territory), and served as the standard version until the publication in 1962 of the new translation by Metropolitan Ilarion (Ivan Ohiienko), the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada. Alongside the Bible, Shakespeare was Kulish’s other main translation project, although in his lifetime he was able to publish only one volume, in 1882, containing his versions of Othello, The Comedy of Errors, and Troilus and Cressida. In his preface to this edition, Kulish emphasized the diversity of Shakespearean language and imagery, and criticized those translations that attempted “smoothing down” his texts to make them fit better the prescription of adherence to Neoclassicist stylistic registers. Thereby

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Vitaly Chernetsky

Kulish launched what Strikha terms the “baroque” approach to translation, which emphasizes experimentation with vocabulary and style over smooth readability (2006: 91). This approach, however, was not in tune with the prevailing tastes of its era, and in the posthumous edition of other Shakespeare’s plays translated by Kulish serialized in 1899–1902, the editor, Ivan Franko, a major writer whose own aesthetic and political views were quite distant from Kulish’s, made numerous editorial changes that, in Strikha’s opinion, made the text more “smooth” but also less successful (2006: 85–87). The same year as Kulish’s first Shakespeare volume, another Ukrainian translation of a Shakespeare play saw the light of day: Hamlet by Mykhailo Staryts’kyi (1840– 1904). Its effect was truly explosive, as the translator successfully navigated all the obstacles of censorship in the post-Ems era and had the text published in Russia. Moreover, the outcry by the right-wing Russian press made this publication all the more noticed and debated. Staryts’kyi was criticized for changing the meter of the text from iambic to trochaic pentameter. (Strikha suggests that Staryts’kyi could have been influenced by Serbian epic songs, which he had translated immediately prior to embarking on the Hamlet project and which are in fact composed in a trochaic meter (2006: 77)). Overall, however, this rendition came to be valued highly by later generations of critics and translators, and to be regarded as the beginning of another paradigm of Ukrainian literary translation, with its emphasis on lucidity and precision, and a very sparing use of dialectalisms and archaisms – what Strikha terms the “classical,” or “mainstream” school (2006: 90–91). Both schools, the “classical” and the “baroque,” thus date back to roughly the same period (late 1870s – early 1880s), and for all their profound aesthetic differences, both persevered during a period of serious repression by the Russian imperial authorities, at a time when even many leaders of the Ukrainian cultural movement wondered if these translations “of various Mickiewiczs, Byrons, etc.” were necessary.10 One of the important shifts that took place in the late nineteenth century concerned the implied audience of Ukrainian-language writing. For several previous generations, although the overwhelming majority of the readership was constituted by the intelligentsia (educators, parish priests, minor civil servants, etc.), the implied addressee of much of the writing was “the people,” understood first and foremost to mean the peasantry. By the end of the nineteenth century, though, a major shift was underway, in that a portion of Ukrainian literati of the younger generations began to rebel against the prevailing populist ethos. Writing for intellectuals was at last being acknowledged as a legitimate occupation, and the literary scene also began structuring itself into schools, groups, and movements. Simultaneously, as Strikha notes (95), in the 1890s translation shifted from being a preoccupation of a few individual authors to a major segment of the mainstream literary process. In addition to literary texts, 10. This particular statement comes from a 1882 letter by Mykola (a.k.a. Nikolai) Kostomarov, a noted historian who published a number of literary translations himself during an earlier era, in the 1840s (see Strikha 2006: 9, 91).



Nation and translation 

translators now turned to scholarly texts in the humanities, social, and natural sciences, and in the liberal conditions of Austrian rule in Galicia, book editions of translations, by the early 1900s, ranged from Shakespeare and Dante to Marx and Engels, to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, and to Hugo, Zola, and Maupassant (Strikha 95). The bibliography of translations by Ivan Franko alone, Western Ukraine’s leading literary figure of that era, runs to dozens of pages. Additionally, theater companies began staging Ukrainian-language translations of foreign plays, such as Gogol’s Government Inspector, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, the plays of Hauptmann, and Ukrainian-language versions of such operas as Verdi’s Traviata, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, first in Galicia, and since 1906 also in the Russian-ruled part of Ukraine (Strikha 2006: 96–97). Simultaneously, Ukrainians began moving towards the professionalization of translation, as evidenced by the work of Petro Nishchyns’kyi, a graduate of the University of Athens who in the 1880s–1890s translated into Ukrainian Antigone by Sophocles, the full text of The Odyssey, and the first half of The Iliad (the project was interrupted by the translator’s death in 1896; see Strikha 2006: 117–18). Critical essays on the subject of translation were also becoming more common. While their focus was quite diverse, the uniting principle was voiced by Franko in his 1911 essay, “The Stonecutters – the Ukrainian Text and the Polish Translation: Remarks on the Art of Translation”: “For every cultured nation, beginning with ancient Rome, good translations of important and influential works of foreign literatures have served as a foundation of its own literature.”11 Lesia Ukraïnka (1871–1913), Ukraine’s greatest woman writer and one of its leading Modernists, openly advocated an ambitious translation program aimed at modernizing Ukrainian literature and flatly rejected the idea of literature “only for the people,” i.e., the less educated strata of society (see Strikha 2006: 124–25). Her choice to work on translations of Heine, and especially those of ancient Egyptian texts and the Rigveda, may seem surprising for an avowed Modernist, yet in the field of translation she too felt that the task of “building up” the national literature was central. For others, like Ahatanhel Kryms’kyi, for many years a leading Orientalist scholar in the Russian Empire, and then, after its collapse, one of the founders and leaders of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, translations of classical Arabic and Persian poets were an extension of his scholarly interests. As with Ukrainka, however, they also came to represent an expansion and deepening of the field of authors and themes that can “speak Ukrainian” and thus expand the capacities of Ukrainian literature. The outbreak of World War I brought these developments to a halt, as the ban on Ukrainian-language publications was reintroduced, and expanded to a portion of Galicia during the tsarist army’s brief occupation in late 1914 – early 1915. The brutality of the policies in Galicia ended up having an effect opposite to the Russian government’s intentions, as it virtually destroyed the Russophile political movement there. Notably, 11. Quoted in Strikha 123.

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during the reoccupation of a portion of Galicia in 1916, the ban on education and publications in Ukrainian was not reintroduced, and the Russian authorities even brought in Ukrainian textbooks published in Russia before the war – while the ban on them remained in force on the territory of the Russian Empire (see Shevelov 1989: 21, 56–58).

Independence, Soviet Domination and translation’s changing fortunes The situation changed radically, however, when following the February 1917 revolution in Russia an autonomous Ukrainian government took power in Kyiv, eventually declaring full independence in January 1918. The Struggle for Independence, as the years 1917–1920 are known in Ukrainian historiography, ended with the establishment of Bolshevik rule in Ukraine and its incorporation into the newly formed Soviet Union in 1922. However, these turbulent years also witnessed an unprecedented burst of Ukrainian cultural activity. With the exception of the period of the first brief Bolshevik occupation of Kyiv in early 1918, all the competing authorities on Ukrainian territory – including even the staunchly anti-Ukrainian troops of the White general Anton Denikin – either actively encouraged Ukrainian cultural development, or, in the case of Denikin, declared a policy of tolerance towards them (see Strikha 2006: 142). The Bolshevik government too, since 1919, proclaimed a policy of supporting the development of Ukrainian language and culture, and during the period of Soviet history that Terry Martin has called “the affirmative action empire” (see Martin 2001a and 2001b), especially during the 1920s, Ukrainian-language cultural activities experienced an unprecedented boom. Somewhat paradoxically, though, even after the establishment of Bolshevik rule, for a long time the informal leadership in the field of literary translation was held by a group whose aesthetic and intellectual outlook could hardly be described as overlapping with the Bolshevik project. This group of writers who came to be known as “the Neoclassicists” (neoklasyky) is primarily associated with the names of the poets Mykola Zerov, Maksym Ryl’s’kyi, Pavlo Fylypovych, Mykhailo Drai-Khmara, and Oswald Burghardt, and with the prose writer Viktor Petrov (also known by his pen name V. Domontovych) as their close associate. The fate of this group was tragic: Zerov, Fylypovych, and Drai-Khmara perished in the Stalinist Gulag; Ryl’s’kyi, after an arrest and imprisonment in 1931, renounced his earlier views and turned into an official Stalinist poet; Burghardt, as an ethnic German, was able to emigrate in the early 1930s but became unmentionable in the Soviet Union; and Petrov led a shocking double (or, rather, triple) life as a respected scholar, an innovative writer and activist in the anti-Soviet Ukrainian movement, and a Soviet secret services operative.12 The Neoclassicists stood out in the field of Ukrainian literature due to their strong academic background and an emphasis on education, skill, and continuity of cultural development. Zerov, the movement’s informal leader, declared their orientation 12. On Petrov’s complex and contradictory life and career, see Aheieva 2006.



Nation and translation 

towards the examples of ancient, especially Latin, poetry, and the French school of Parnassian poets. In his own output, translations far outnumber original poetry, and the bulk of these translated texts is predictably constituted by Roman poets (Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, Propertius, Martial, and others); indeed, Zerov’s first book publication was an anthology of Roman poetry, released in the midst of hunger and devastation in 1920. However, the individual Neoclassicists’ tastes were quite diverse, as were their translation projects. Zerov’s translation output includes texts as varied as Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and Chekhov’s “The Black Monk,” and French poets ranging from Ronsard to Baudelaire. He continued translating in the Solovki Gulag camp, where he began learning English; several of his translations from the prison years, including Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” survived in the letters to his wife. Overall, next to the poetry of ancient Rome, the literatures of Russia, Poland, and France account for the bulk of the translation efforts by the Neoclassicists. Given their emphasis on rigor, precision, and craft, as well as a truly Mandelstamian “yearning for world culture,” it is surprising to some extent that the Acmeists do not figure among the Russian poets whom they attempted to translate. In the 1920s, the Neoclassicists prepared volumes of selected translations of Pushkin and Valerii Briusov, and in the later years, Ryl’s’kyi focused primarily on Pushkin as well (his rendition of “The Bronze Horseman” is truly a major accomplishment, while the critical reception of Ryl’s’kyi’s translation of Eugene Onegin has been more mixed). Of the projects undertaken by the Neoclassicists, Ryl’s’kyi’s 1927 translation of Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz and the unfinished project of an anthology of modern French poetry have probably generated the greatest resonance. However, as Strikha notes, despite their strong investment in translation activities, the Neoclassicists wrote surprisingly little about translation; their views can be primarily gleaned from scattered remarks in their critical writings on other topics, personal letters, and book reviews, including Zerov’s fairly negative review of Oleksandr Finkel’s 1929 volume Teoriia i praktyka perekladu (Theory and practice of translation), a book that nevertheless holds the distinction of being the first book on translation theory published in the Soviet Union (see Strikha 2006: 19, 197–200). According to Strikha, the Neoclassicists were largely in agreement with the views expressed by Briusov in his programmatic 1905 essay “Fialki v tigele” (“Violets in the Crucible,” the title alluding to a remark by Shelley) namely, with its emphasis on rendering the “aesthetic essence” of the original (hence perhaps their decision to produce a volume of selected Briusov in Ukrainian translation); Ryl’s’kyi paraphrased this idea by calling it a ‘search for the original author’s creative dominant,”13 thus recasting Briusov’s views in the terminology of Russian Formalism. The realm of Ukrainian literary translation before the onset of Stalinist repressions in the 1930s was by no means limited to the Neoclassicists’ projects. In the field of prose translation, a major breakthrough was accomplished by Valeriian Pidmohyl’nyi, a leading novelist and short story writer who also produced acclaimed translations 13. Quoted in Strikha 199.

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from the French, most notably of Maupassant and Anatole France, two authors who also exercised considerable influence on Pidmohyl’nyi’s own writing. Other notable achievements singled out by Strikha include the translations of Hesiod and Aristophanes by Volodymyr Svidzins’kyi, an idiosyncratic hermetic Modernist, and the innovative rendition of Robert Burns’s poetry by Vasyl’ Mysyk (see Strikha 2006: 201– 02). Nor was the expansion of literary translation into Ukrainian proceeding smoothly, as evidenced for example by the outraged reaction of many Russian critics to the 1926 switch of Ukrainian opera houses to using Ukrainian rather than Russian translations of Western classics. These critics found no apparent lapse of logic in their claim that it would be more “natural” for the Ukrainian audiences to hear Rossini and Verdi in a Russian translation on a Ukrainian stage (incidentally, many notable Russian opera singers, like the tenor Leonid Sobinov, had no problem with learning their lines in Ukrainian and were quite proud of doing so (see Strikha 2006: 152, 197). An even graver scandal resulted from Maxim Gorky’s 1927 open letter in which he responded to a request to grant permission to translate his novel Mother, later proclaimed an archetypal text of socialist realism, into Ukrainian. Gorky claimed that such a translation would be “unnecessary” and expressed displeasure at the supposed oppression of Russian-language speakers in Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian intellectuals were especially outraged by the fact that in this letter, Gorky repeatedly referred to Ukrainian as a dialect (narechie) rather than a language (iazyk) (see Strikha 2006: 208–09). On the whole, however, the development of literary, as well as scholarly and technical translation in the 1920s Ukraine was truly without precedent – which made the consequences of the later years of Stalinist repression all the more catastrophic, as dozens of major translators (including Pidmohyl’nyi and Svidzins’kyi) perished at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen while others, like Mysyk, Hryhorii Kochur, and Borys Ten, who would emerge, together with Mykola Lukash, as the informal leaders of Ukrainian literary translator community from the 1960s onward, endured many years in the Gulag but eventually returned to creative work. The purges also claimed numerous lexicographers and other linguists, as well as specialists in all branches of the arts, humanities, and social sciences; even the 1928 Ukrainian orthography, approved by a specially appointed commission of the Academy of Sciences, was denounced as “counterrevolutionary.” True, in the case of those Ukrainian writers whose lives were spared by the regime at the price of switching to writing panegyrics to Stalin, like Ryl’s’kyi and another major Modernist, Mykola Bazhan, the Stalinist years still brought high-quality translations (albeit of “safe” texts, like Eugene Onegin in the case of Ryl’s’kyi and Shota Rustaveli’s Knight in Panther’s Skin in the case of Bazhan, both first published in 1937). Overall, however, the price they paid was so high that during the Thaw era these authors mostly limited their efforts to helping to bring back from proscription the work of their deceased colleagues. While the quality of their original writing never really rebounded, they were able to preserve vestiges of their own strong literary form, as in such notable accomplishments as Bazhan’s translations of Rilke and Ryl’s’kyi’s of the Polish Modernist poet Julian Tuwim.



Nation and translation 

While the context of Ukrainian literary life outside the Soviet Union in the interwar years allowed for publication of a wide range of texts inaccessible in the Soviet Union, for aesthetic as well as political reasons, the present critical consensus is that relatively few of those translations ranked high from an aesthetic point of view. The situation would change significantly as a large number of Ukrainian intellectuals found themselves in the West as displaced persons at the end of World War II. As a result, Ukrainian translation activities in the Diaspora included such notable accomplishments as the numerous translations of Western and Russian poets by Mykhailo Orest, Mykola Zerov’s younger brother who continued Zerov’s tradition of lucid, clear, and rigorous translation and, on the other end of the spectrum, the experimental translations by Ihor Kostets’kyi, whose innovative projects included a monumental translation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and provocative renderings of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructed seventeenth-century literary Ukrainian. Kostets’kyi’s translation projects in particular, by challenging the viewpoints on translation then dominant in the Ukrainian intellectual circles, carried an avant-garde impetus for “shaking up” the status quo in Ukrainian letters, heretofore curiously limited in Ukrainian literary translation, as most avant-gardist writers of the earlier era, such as Mykhail’ Semenko, the leader of the Ukrainian Futurists, did not contribute in a major way to translation projects. The main struggle for reviving Ukrainian translation, however, took place within the Soviet Union’s borders, as the beginnings of the Thaw era brought back from the Gulag camps several notable translators who were at the beginning stage of their careers at the time of their arrests, as well as a number of talented persons of the younger generation. Kochur, a student of Zerov’s who would emerge as a central figure in Ukrainian literary translation upon his return from the camps, combined his active translation work with organizing a circle of independent young intellectuals. These efforts included his collaboration with Ryl’s’kyi on anthologies of modern Czech and Slovak poetry (which included Kochur’s highly acclaimed translations of the Czech Surrealist Vítězslav Nezval), a new translation of Hamlet published in 1964, and scholarly studies on the reception of Shakespeare and Dante in Ukrainian literature, to name but a few, side by side with such politically charged projects as the preparation of a volume of selected works of Mykola Zerov, finally released in 1966 after much official resistance. In 1969, a volume of Kochur’s selected poetic translations was published, becoming a major event in Ukrainian cultural life. Yet trouble was not far away: in 1972, a new wave of arrests of dissidents swept through Ukraine. Kochur was spared arrest but was forced to testify at a trial of another dissident, Ievhen Sverstiuk; however, Kochur’s testimony praised his colleague’s skill as a literary critic and did not produce the result the regime had wanted. Almost immediately, a denunciatory campaign against Kochur was launched in the official media, leading to his expulsion from the Writers’ Union and a ban on the publication of his work that lasted until 1979, when Valentyn Malanchuk, a particularly odious party apparatchik, was removed from his position as the ideology secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and another mini-thaw took place in Ukraine. However, only during perestroika was

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Kochur fully able to return to publication, when in 1988 his membership in the Writers’ Union was restored, and a nearly 600-page-long volume of his selected poetic translations, Druhe vidlunnia (Second Echo), was released shortly before the collapse of the USSR (Kochur 1991). While in terms of his approach to translation, Kochur was a follower of the Staryts’kyi – Zerov line of lucid, “classical” translation, his close friend and colleague Mykola Lukash became his generation’s leading representative of the school of experimental translation. Lukash burst onto the Ukrainian literary scene in 1955 with his accomplished translations of Goethe’s Faust and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, making the previously unknown translator a major figure in Ukrainian letters. He had completed his version of Faust in 1948, and the delay in its publication was due to the controversy surrounding his choice to use some elements of vocabulary more characteristic of Ukrainian letters of the first half of the nineteenth century – only the strong support of Ryl’s’kyi, himself a follower of a different approach to translating, made the publication eventually a reality. While Lukash continued to work actively for the next decade and a half, and published his acclaimed version of Boccaccio’s Decameron in 1964, his unorthodox approach to vocabulary and stylistic choices continuously generated controversy. Critical voices included, somewhat paradoxically, a few Diasporic poets who lambasted Lukash’s translations of Garcia Lorca published in 1969 for being too “folksy,” although Lukash’s defenders (Strikha among them) have argued in favor of his attempts to find a Ukrainian equivalent of the core aesthetic of the original texts he rendered, while sacrificing at times word-for-word fidelity. Similarly to Kochur, Lukash found himself in great trouble in 1973, in his case for writing an open letter in support of Ivan Dziuba, a leading Ukrainian dissident who had authored the famous book Internationalism or Russification? (Dziuba 1968) and who had been experiencing significant health problems while in prison. Like Kochur, Lukash was expelled from the Writers’ Union and prohibited from publication; in fact, both of them became “nonpersons” whose names could not be uttered in print for several years. Only in 1981, after much struggle, Lukash’s translation of Faust was reissued, followed in 1984 by a volume of his masterful translations of Apollinaire. His final major publication was a new translation of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1986); in 1987, Lukash’s membership in the Writers’ Union was restored, but the writer passed away the following year, leaving at his deathbed an unfinished translation of Don Quixote, later completed by a prominent younger translator, Anatol’ Perepadia, and eventually published in 1995. In summarizing the importance of Lukash’s contributions to Ukrainian letters, Strikha expresses his agreement with the Ukrainian translation theorist Lada Kolomiiets’, who has argued that [i]n the context of Lukash’s national idea, translation activity meant something much bigger than an attempt to influence the current state and prospects of the development of national culture through the means of literary translation. This “something” was a desire to change the historical image of Ukrainian culture, influence not



Nation and translation 

only its future but also its past, and to reinvigorate those language and style traditions within Ukrainian literature that did attempt to develop but did not succeed in establishing themselves. (Kolomiiets’ 2004: 337; Kolomiiets’’s emphasis)

Lukash’s and Kochur’s struggles and aspirations were shared by two other major translators mentioned earlier, Vasyl’ Mysyk (1907–1983) and Borys Ten (1897–1983), both of them Gulag survivors who had debuted in literature shortly before their arrests. Mysyk, who first attracted notice with his translations of Robert Burns in 1932, was able to return to publication in the late 1950s, and contributed a significant number of poetic translations of English-language poetry (including a much-praised volume of Keats in 1968 and a wide range of other authors, from Shakespeare to Whitman) and several editions of classical Persian poets (such as Omar Khayyam and Hafiz). Ten, by contrast, primarily focused on ancient Greek authors, breaking back into print in 1949 with his translation of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, and going on to produce what are now the standard translations of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. In the richness of their vocabulary, accomplished poetic technique, and stylistic sensitivity, the work of Mysyk and Ten stand side by side with that of their acclaimed colleagues Kochur and Lukash. Moreover, Ten, like Kochur, was also an informal leader of a dissident circle, in his case in the city of Zhytomyr where he was forced to settle after his return from the camps, as he had been denied residence in Kyiv. The most tragic yet life-affirming examples of translation activity can be found in the work of two of Ukraine’s leading dissidents imprisoned by the Soviet regime in the 1970s, Vasyl’ Stus (1938–1985) and Ivan Svitlychnyi (1929–1992), who in the harsh prison conditions continued their literary activity, and translation efforts in particular. Stus, arguably Ukraine’s greatest poet of the second half of the twentieth century, died in the camps during the first months of Gorbachev’s rule; during his years of imprisonment, it was his work on Rilke that to a significant extent sustained him intellectually and emotionally. For Svitlychnyi, acclaimed for his volume of Ukrainian renditions of Beranger published in 1970, the translations of French poets played a similar role (see Strikha 2006: 290–98). Yet honoring their heroism and sacrifice should not preclude us from recognizing the importance of the often ingenious efforts made by their colleagues who were trying to work within the limits of the Soviet system. Thus Vsesvit (Universe), the monthly journal of literature in Ukrainian translation founded in 1958, developed a sophisticated policy of encouraging Ukraine’s urban population, increasingly russified in the 1960s–1970s, to read in Ukrainian by publishing texts by Western authors unavailable in Russian translations, ranging from the works of Kafka to the first translation in the USSR of Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. In other words, sustaining and developing Ukrainian culture through literary translation was always a many-pronged effort involving both the self-sacrificing work of political prisoners and the inventive promotion of national identity by encouraging the public to read foreign bestsellers in Ukrainian.

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Vitaly Chernetsky

Translation in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Challenges and hopes The end of Soviet rule coincided in Ukraine, as elsewhere in the former Soviet territories, with a profound economic crisis. To an even higher degree than in most other post-Soviet countries, the nation’s publishing industry was hit hard, as the state-controlled venues for publication and distribution rapidly disintegrated. On the other hand, under the new conditions, despite the flooding of the Ukrainian market with cheap Russian-language mass literature that resulted from an imbalance of taxation and customs policies pertaining to the publishing industry in Ukraine and Russia, the publication industry eventually began, slowly but surely, to recover. Now the publications of translations were frequently funded by Western institutions, such as the International Renaissance Foundation supported by George Soros, or the programs of state assistance run by such countries as France and the Netherlands. The translated texts ranged from academic titles to notable classic and contemporary literary texts from the countries that funded the projects. A marked change was the near-disappearance of translations from Russian, as Russia has remained uninterested in, and indeed in the case of Ukraine, actively hostile to funding translation activity. Simultaneously, the rise of new commercial publishing houses, such as the acclaimed A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MAHA, specializing in literature for children and young adults, provided new opportunities, such as banking on bold, eye-catching design, high-quality printing, and the speed and quality of translations (in an unprecedented feat, their translation of the final volume of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was the first to come out in any language, only sixty-five days after the publication of the English original), thereby continuing the approach developed by Vsesvit back in the 1960s. Thus, while it is understandable that Maksym Strikha would argue in the conclusion to his study that the nation-making phase of Ukrainian literary translation activity is essentially over in the context of post-Soviet independence (see Strikha 2006: 303–13), the uphill battle continues. While it would be virtually impossible at present to hear arguments against translation of literary and scholarly texts into Ukrainian, many Ukrainian bookstores continue to be dominated by books imported from Russia. In an adjacent area, the Ukrainian-language dubbing and subtitling of foreign films and TV shows has been encountering fierce resistance from a number of distributors and movie theater operators; yet despite their protestations the 2007 introduction of new dubbing and subtitling requirements did not lead to a decrease in their revenue. While high-quality Ukrainian-language dubbing projects (such as the acclaimed versions of Disney’s Cars and the American TV show ALF, a huge hit in Ukraine thanks to the outstanding dubbing) arguably have greater effect than the restrictive measures against Russian-language versions (after all, the poorly dubbed Russian-language ALF fell flat), most commentators agree that some defensive policies are warranted in this context. Yet simultaneously with these efforts directed primarily at the mass audience, in contemporary Ukraine there are still numerous efforts by prominent writers who



Nation and translation

dedicate significant amounts of energy to translation activities. Both in their choice of texts and in their approach to translation they have continued the work of their predecessors who strove to expand the field of Ukrainian letters and effect a paradigm shift in the prevailing approaches and tastes. These efforts proceed sometimes by way of careful nudging, sometimes by open provocation. Thus, in the case of Yuri Andrukhovych, recognized by many as Ukraine’s leading contemporary writer, his translation efforts have ranged from semi-dissident Russian magic realism (Anatolii Kim) to Polish anti-Soviet dystopias (Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Minor Apocalypse) to the modernist poetry of Rilke and Pasternak. However, in recent years, Andrukhovych’s translation work has primarily been focused on English-language texts; he produced new Ukrainian-language versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, with the specific aim of making these texts speak to the younger Ukrainian audience. Most notably, however, in 2006 he released a sizeable anthology of American poetry of the 1950s–1960s in his translations (Andrukhovych 2006). By making the texts by the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain poets speak fluent Ukrainian, Andrukhovych provided a powerful impetus to expanding the language and themes thinkable in the context of Ukrainian letters – from Ginsberg’s Howl to O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” to Robert Duncan’s “This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom.” Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine’s leading contemporary woman writer, has brought a similar set of concerns to her translations of Sylvia Plath and Derek Walcott, seeking to verbalize, for the Ukrainian readership, aspects of their gendered and postcolonial aesthetics. For Volodymyr Dibrova, translating Samuel Beckett became a stage on the road to making sense of the absurdity of the late-Soviet (and post-Soviet civilization) and narrating this absurdity in his own texts. Several writers of the younger generation, having debuted in the post-Soviet context, likewise pursue translation projects in the hope of expanding the universe of Ukrainian letters. For Andrii Bondar, an acclaimed poet and essayist, this has manifested in his work on translating some of the most difficult Polish-language prose, such as Witold Gombrowicz’s Modernist masterpiece Ferdydurke and Michal Witkowskiś Lubiewo, an innovative text by a radical gay author, for which Bondar had, in essence, to “design” Ukrainian-language gay slang. For more on the translation of gay literature in Eastern Europe, see Tratnik in the present volume.) Another prominent contemporary author, Serhii Zhadan, whose own poetry and prose stem from a tradition of countercultural rebellion and the writer’s own anarchist political sympathies, published a portfolio of translations of poetry by the radical Russian émigré queer author, Yaroslav Mogutin. Given the near-absence of gay male voices in contemporary Ukrainian letters, the turn of these two heterosexual but gay-friendly writers to foreign queer texts has given a voice to a virtually silent segment of contemporary Ukrainian society. By helping Ukrainian culture speak in a multitude of such diverse voices, contemporary writer-translators take the nation-making project to a new level, reinventing it as an integral part of a non-hierarchical and open project of cultural globalization.

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Vitaly Chernetsky

Works cited Aheieva, Vira. 2006. Poetyka paradoksa: Intelektual’na proza Viktora Petrova-Domontovycha. Kyiv: Fakt, 2006. Andrukhovych, Iurii. 2006. Den’ smerti pani Den’: Amerykans’ka poeziia 1950–60-kh rokiv u perekladakh Iuriia Andrukhovycha. Kharkiv: Folio. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2004. “Thick Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 389–401. New York: Routledge Bassnett, Susan, and Lefevere, André (eds.). 1990. Translation, History and Culture. London/ New York: Pinter. Bassnett, Susan and Trivedi, Harish (eds.). 1999. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Dziuba, Ivan. 1968. Internationalism or Russification? A Study in the Soviet Nationalities Problem. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Friedberg, Maurice. 1997. Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Grabowicz, George G. 2003. Do istoriï ukraïns’koï literatury, 2nd ed. Kyiv: Krytyka. Kenan, Lin. 2002. “Translation as a Catalyst for Social Change in China.” In Translation and Power, edited by 160–183. Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kochur, Hryhorii. 1991. Druhe vidlunnia [Maistry poetychnoho perekladu]. Kyiv: Dnipro. Kolomiiets’, Lada. 2004. Kontseptual’no-metodolohichni zasady suchasnoho ukraïns’koho poetychnoho perekladu. Kyiv: Kyïvs’kyi universytet. Martin, Terry. 2001a. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Martin, Terry. 2001b. “An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism.” In A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, edited by Ronald G. Suny and Terry Martin, 67–90. New York: Oxford UP. Miller, Aleksei. 2003. The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century. Budapest: Central European UP. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Savchenko, Fedir. 1970. The Suppression of the Ukrainian Activities in 1876. Munich: W. Fink. Schwartz, Benjamin. 1964. In Search of Wealth and Power: Yan Fu and the West. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Shevelov, George Y. 1989. The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1900–1941): Its State and Status. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Simon, Sherry, and St.-Pierre, Paul (eds.). 2000. Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2004. “The Politics of Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 369–88. New York: Routledge Strikha, Maksym. 2006. Ukraïns’kyi khudozhnii pereklad: Mizh literaturoiu i natsiietvorenniam. Kyiv: Fakt.



Nation and translation  Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Venuti, Lawrence. 2005. “Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities.” In Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, 177–202. Princeton: Princeton UP.

Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation David L. Cooper

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA The obsessive concern in Russian literary criticism with the national qualities of Russian literature in the second third of the nineteenth century has been traced in Russian literary historiography back into the 1820s and the debates over romanticism and narodnost’ (national originality). But the subject was broached publicly in the 1810s in debates that concerned translations as original and markedly Russian works of literature. While translation came to be seen as inimical to narodnost’ in the 1820s and 30s, it would return in a new form as a part of a generalized assimilative cultural project in the 1840s in Nikolai Gogol’s formulation of the nature and mission of the Russian nation. This paradoxical role played by translation, its function in the creation of original literature is, in both periods, linked to the work of Vasilii Zhukovskii. This article demonstrates how Zhukovskii’s practice as a translator, formed in the Friendly Literary Society of his youth and modeled after that of his friend Andrei Turgenev, evoked a critical response that engaged the newest concerns of Russia’s literary elite and generated new critical language and ideas through a productive mixing of classicist and romantic discourse on translations. Zhukovskii as an author-translator thus offers a rich case study to those interested in the creative aspect of translation.

Introduction Long before Vissarion Belinskii’s famous declaration in “Literary Reveries” (1834) that there is no Russian literature, before even the 1820s debates on romanticism and narodnost’ that canonized the problem of the national qualities of Russian literature, this problem emerged in public critical exchanges in the 1810s that concerned translations. The so-called “battle of the ballads” (1816) pitted defenders of Vasilii Zhukovskii’s translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s Lenore (1773) against those who championed Pavel Katenin’s version.1 Parallel to this “battle” ran contemporaneous debates on the 1. For a summary of the polemics see Mordovchenko (1959: 148–52). For the repercussions of this polemics in the 1820s and beyond see Tynianov (1969: 36–45).

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Russian hexameter (1813 until the late 1810s) concerning the proper metrical form for the Russian epic and the possibilities for the imitation of Greek metrical forms, and the prestigious hexameter in particular.2 While these polemics primarily concerned issues of poetic style, form, and diction (including the question of the admissibility of folkloric discourse) – and the critical literature has explored these matters – participants in these polemics also began to formulate a problem that would become central in the coming decades: how to make Russian literature genuinely Russian. We are accustomed to the privileged place of the concept of “originality” in romantic critical discourse on national literatures, and therefore it may strike us as somewhat paradoxical to find the problem of the Russian national literature first articulated in debates over translation. I would like to try here to account for the privileged role of translation at this point in Russian literary development and, further, to demonstrate the long-term vitality of these debates in the Russian discourse on the “national literature” and “national poets.” The central figure in this story is Vasilii Zhukovskii, the leading poet of this period. Zhukovskii’s influential translation practice evoked a critical response that engaged the concerns of Russia’s literary elite and generated new critical language and ideas. This is also, then, an exploration of the contributions of Zhukovskii to the myth of Pushkin as a national poet, to the discourse on the Russian national literature, and to ideas on translations and translating. Translation is an activity that involves mediation between national languages, national literatures, authors, and peoples. Studies of translation frequently consider the influence of one author upon another (the translator) or of one literary tradition upon another. But mediation also implies a resistance, from the resistance of the target language to certain forms of the original language, to the resistance in the target culture to forms or practices in the culture of the original work. As Antoine Berman writes in his model study of the German romantics’ ideas on translation, “every culture resists translation, even if it has an essential need for it. The very aim of translation – to open up in writing a certain relation to the Other, to fertilize what is one’s Own through the mediation of what is Foreign – is diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of every culture, that species of narcissism by which every society wants to be a pure and unadulterated Whole. There is a tinge of the violence of crossbreeding in translation.” The translator, in fulfilling the cultural need for translation, works within the context of cultural resistance to translation: “Cultural resistance produces a systematics of deformations that operates on the linguistic and literary levels, and that conditions the translator, whether he wants it or not, whether he knows it or not” (1992: 4, 5). It is possible for this cultural resistance to dominate the translation practice of a given time and place, for translation to become an ethnocentric appropriation where no quarter is given to the difference of the Other. Such was, in the estimation of the German romantics, the translation practice of the French in the eighteenth century. 2. For summaries of the debates see Egunov (2001: 157ff) and Burgi (1954: 107–17).



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

August Wilhelm Schlegel observed that “other nations have adopted a totally conventional phraseology in poetry, so that it is totally impossible to make a poetic translation of anything whatsoever into their language – French is an example. ... It is as if they wanted every foreigner among them to behave and to dress according to the customs of the land, and that explains why they never really get to know the foreign” (Berman 1992: 36). In contrast, for the German romantics getting to know the foreign, whether through translation or other means, was essential to the development of culture, to Bildung, and they articulated ideas of translation that emphasized the opening of the native literature to otherness (43–52).3 Zhukovskii enters the Russian literary scene at a time when the Russian resistance to French cultural and literary practices and the demand for a native culture is about to rise dramatically. There is a profound tension between the growing resistance to cultural cross-breeding and the desperate need for new forms and the productive fertilization translation provides. In his writings on translation and in his evaluation of his own translation practice, Zhukovskii responds to both of these conflicting poles, seeking a way to inscribe a distinct identity while maintaining an intimate relationship with the foreign. In dialogue with Nikolai Gogol in the 1840s, responding to his first reading of Gogol’s Selected Passages with its interpretations of his particular genius as a writer (to which we shall return), Zhukovskii says of his methods, “I have often noted that I have the clearest thoughts when I have to improvise them in expressing or supplementing others’ (chuzhikh) thoughts. My mind is like a flint that has to be struck upon a stone in order that sparks fly from it. That is in general the character of my authorial creativity; with me everything is either another’s (chuzhoe) or apropos of another’s; and everything is, nonetheless, mine (moe)” (Zhukovskii 1960: 4: 544).4 This mature self-evaluation responds to a lifetime of critical evaluations, some of which harshly criticized Zhukovskii for the prominent role of translation in his creative work and for introducing a foreign spirit into Russian letters.

3. As Berman shows, however, for the Jena romantics this opening to the Other was limited, as they sought primarily reflections of their own concerns and idealist visions in the “universal progressive poetry” they translated, whereas Goethe, Humboldt, and Hölderlin confronted more directly the radical otherness of the foreign (1992: 15, 136–140). 4. From a letter to Gogol dated February 6 (18), 1847. In fact, Zhukovskii here is proposing to write in response to Gogol’s book some letters of his own, perhaps to be collected themselves in book form (1978: 4: 550). Moreover, Zhukovskii may have had some input into Gogol’s own formulations. According to Gogol’s testimony in another chapter of the book (“O lirizme nashikh poetov,” addressed to Zhukovskii), Zhukovskii had read his initial draft of the chapter on the essence of Russian poetry and critiqued it thoroughly, demanding a rewrite. See Gogol’ (1978: 6: 215).

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The formation of Zhukovskii’s practice The roots of Zhukovskii’s creative methods and the central role that translation assumed in them can be found in the activities of the Friendly Literary Society (Druzheskoe literaturnoe obshchestvo, founded January 1801) of his youth and in particular in the leadership and example of Andrei Turgenev (1781–1803).5 Turgenev’s aims for the society involved developing the character of its participants according to the Sturm und Drang ideal of the schöne Seele (beautiful soul) through a deepening of their spiritual bond of friendship, and shared literary activity was the means (Zorin 1995– 96: 10). The society maintained its activities for only six months, and when in November Turgenev was reassigned from Moscow to the Commission on Lawmaking in Petersburg, there was little incentive that remained to resume among those its activities. Such an ephemeral literary alliance may seem unlikely to have had a significant impact, but commentators have agreed that Andrei Turgenev’s impression on the young Zhukovskii was deep. Turgenev modeled an ideal of self-realization and self-formation through identification with the works of foreign authors and the translation of their works. In his own diary, Turgenev translated verses from Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” (1785) and passages from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) for the expression of his own deepest feelings, often without marking the passages as anything other than his own. He proposed that society members translate from Werther in order to tune their own souls (Zorin 1995–96: 11–12, 15–17). Il’ia Vinitskii notes that Turgenev whispered verses from Karamzin and Schiller in church as a prayer, thus expressing his own most intimate thoughts and feelings through others’ verses (1997: 253).6 One might see in this a profound opening of the forming self to the Other, but in these private translations and appropriations of others’ words there were also limits to Turgenev’s apprehension of the Other. Vinitskii observes that the fragmentary nature of some of these private translations marks a limit to the full identification with the author. Certainly in identifying with Werther, Goethe’s character, Turgenev misses out on the full development of Goethe’s perspective, which had moved definitively away from the Wertherian Sturm und Drang enthusiasm with which Turgenev was still filled (1997: 247).7 And it may well be argued that 5. For the translation activities of Andrei Turgenev and Zhukovskii at the time see Veselovskii (1999: 58–62). Two excellent recent studies of Turgenev and the society are Zorin (1995–96) and Vinitskii (1997: 245–59). 6. For a nuanced reading of one of Turgenev’s unmarked diary translations from Goethe see Vinitskii (1997: 247–59). 7. Vinitskii’s analysis of Turgenev’s translation of Goethe’s “Zueignung” marks the many ways in which Turgenev’s prose translation in his diary is a very personal response to Goethe’s verses, rooted in the Masonic mysticism of his father’s circle, that misses entirely the programmatic and polemical stance Goethe takes with this poem.



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

in the appropriative act of taking another’s words without marking them as belonging to another there is an effacement of the Other reminiscent of the French classicist deformations. In his public translations, however, Turgenev modeled a more romantic method. For example, Turgenev disagreed with Zhukovskii in a letter exchange concerning the translation of Shakespeare and the question of making alterations. Where Zhukovskii allowed for the necessity of alteration, Turgenev insisted on leaving Shakespeare as he was. His response to Zhukovskii invokes the paradigm of self and other already familiar from Zhukovskii’s mature self-evaluation, but in a way that places the Other before the self: “Leave this genius, my friends, as he is; to rework him, to insert one’s own (svoe) in place of his, is difficult, very, very difficult (nelegko). The more you understand him, the holier he becomes” (Veselovskii 1999: 60–61). Turgenev models an approach to translation that pursues self-discovery and self-definition through testing one’s ideas and emotions against foreign works of great souls (Vinitskii 1997: 276).8 For Zhukovskii, it seems, subordinating himself so fully to the Other in order to find himself was not so easy. In his early articles on translation from 1809–10 he urgently recommends that the translator contribute something of his own (svoe) to the translation, preferably by submitting the work to the creativity of his own imagination. This will, Zhukovskii argues, allow the translator to become an artist in his own right, an original author (Levin 1985: 11–12). But the interaction with another’s (chuzhoe) work was still an essential means of artistic self-testing and discovery for Zhukovskii. Zhukovskii’s approach to translation was, typically, formed in dialogue with that of another – Andrei Turgenev. His first major publication in 1802 in Vestnik Evropy, his idiosyncratic, resistant translation of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard” (1751), was dedicated to Turgenev.9 And for the remainder of his artistic career, Zhukovskii would continue to find himself in the work of foreign writers, even in the words of third-rate artists (Levin 1985: 16), and would continue to realize himself and his own personality in the translation of those works. Zhukovskii’s insistence that the translator contribute something of his own to the translation reflects a profound resistance to translation, one aspect of which is a resistance to conceiving of translation without willful alteration as an artistic act. In this, it resembles, once again, the competitive resistance to the original familiar from French neoclassicist ideas and practices, but without being identical to it. In order to better analyze Zhukovskii’s methods and ideas and those of his critics it will be useful to outline major characteristics of classicist and romantic translation methodology. Here 8. Vinitskii’s reading of Turgenev’s translation is followed by an equally nuanced reading of Zhukovskii’s later translation of part of the same piece by Goethe, making possible a detailed comparison of Turgenev’s approach and Zhukovskii’s, to which I cannot do full justice here. 9. For an analysis see Toporov (1981: 207–86).

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I draw upon the work of the Czech translation scholar Jiří Levý, specifically his book Czech Translation Theories, but similar discussions are easily found elsewhere, such as in Maurice Friedberg’s cultural history of literary translation in Russia (Friedberg 1997: 25–54). Of particular interest is what Levý says concerning the competitive aspect of classicist translation. The bulk of classicist translation focused on poetry, and authors undertook translations in order to “demonstrate that [they were] capable of the same artistic flight and refined form as the author of the original work” (1957: 65). That is, there was a competition among poets expressed in the making of translations. Levý notes that it was common in classicist criticism of translations to assert that the translation was better than the original. The prestige of the translator was very high and translations played a key role in the development of classicist literature. There was also a supra-personal aspect to this competition, something beyond the personal competition between poets. This competition continued the rivalry between languages that had begun with Renaissance humanism (67, 65). In addition, Levý observes that one goal of works in translation was “artistic competition between the leading classes of two nations” (68). This classicist national competition, an aspect of the individual rivalry among poets, is, we should note, not a competition between two nations in all their national particularity. Rather, the poets and nations compete in the attempt to embody the universal aesthetic principles of classicist poetics. As Levý puts it, the principle that governed classicist translation was the absolutization of the period’s aesthetic norms (67). Thus classicist translations tended to eliminate anything that went against classicist aesthetic norms (a fine form of aesthetic resistance), and in the process eliminated national specificity. The original was “improved” by overcoming the historical and linguistic conditions that marked it and limited its universality (66). Such competition remains primarily poetic, whether it is seen as individual, among poets, or national, among the leading classes of nations in their attempts to embody the universal norms that governed poetry. With romanticism, as Levý shows, an ethos of translation emerges that is diametrically opposed to the classicist ethos. Romantic translators attempted to capture above all else the national, historical, and individual specificity of the original work (69). Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt even proposed that the language of a translation should be somehow marked as foreign (72). Where classicist translators mostly translated verse into verse, romantic translators often translated verse into prose in order to submit themselves only to the sense of the original and not to impose upon it the forms of their own poetic tradition. For the typical romantic translator, the competitive aspect of translation is replaced by a total submission to the original work and author. Translation is often taken as an impossible task, and translations do not have full status as artistic works but are taken as paths to works that are in another language



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

(71–73). Romantic translators in some sense tried to do away with any resistance in the target language and culture to the full assimilation of the original work.10 In his early articles on translation, Zhukovskii exhibits for the most part the typical attitudes of the classicist approach. In his 1810 article, “On Translations in General and in Particular on Translations of Verse” – itself characteristically a translation from the French (of Jacques Delille) – he argues that Pope’s Iliad is better than Homer’s, that verse must be translated by verse, and so forth (Zhukovskii 1985: 283–86, 402). And the phrase that took flight from his 1809 article on Krylov’s fables, his most-cited aphorism on translation, was “The translator in prose is a slave; the translator in verse is a rival,” and he clearly favors the latter (Zhukovskii 1985: 189).11 Yet his insistence that the translator contribute something of his own does not fit comfortably into the classicist perspective, which altered works primarily in conformity with a universalist aesthetics. For Zhukovskii the translator alters in a subjective manner, submitting the work to his own imagination in order to act as an original author – this conception of authorship clearly moves in the direction of sentimentalism and romanticism. This mixture of “classicist” and “romantic” elements reflects, I would suggest, Zhukovskii’s attempts to articulate a perspective on translation and his work as a translator in which the original work and the translation are not opposed, but are seen instead as sharing something fundamental that expresses a shared kernel of authorial identity. A moment from Zhukovskii’s later correspondence, as related by Iurii Levin, is revealing in this regard: Answering, it seems, Vogel’s request that he send him German translations of his verses, Zhukovskii indicated that he had no such translations and added: “I can, however, show you an easy way by which to become acquainted with me as a poet, that is, with my better aspect. Read the following pieces ...”. After which followed a listing of German originals by Schiller, Goethe, Hebel, Rückert, and La MotteFouqué. “Reading all of these poems,” he concluded, “believe or try to convince yourself that all of them are translated from the Russian, from Zhukovskii, or vice versa ... then you will have a full, adequate understanding of my poetic gifts, much more advantageous than if you knew it in naturalibus.” (Levin 1985: 12–13)

This is, as Levin notes, a joke of sorts, but a revealing one. It subverts entirely the romantic hierarchy between original and translation, which we have inherited, and even 10. Levý outlines certain tendencies that are characteristic of the classicist and romantic historical period and abstracts these into two coherent modes that can be used for analysis. But actual practices in these periods varied and any of the defining characteristics of the romantic or classicist mode could easily be found in the other historical period. In what follows, then, I refer to “classicist” or “romantic” method and discourse in relation to these particular definitions of distinct modes as an analytical tool to better distinguish the heterogeneous particular practices of a given time and place. 11. Levý quotes the aphorism with the following lead-in, “Zhukovskii expresses the opinion of the entire epoch [of classicism] with his aphorism” (1957: 71).

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breaks down the distinction between the two necessary to posit the classicist equality of original and translation. Zhukovskii’s self-deprecating humor at the end troubles readings that would give special place to poetic rivalry between the author of the original and Zhukovskii as author of the translation.12

The reception of Zhukovskii’s translations In coming to terms with Zhukovskii’s work, Russian critics often mixed terms and ideas from “classicist” and “romantic” discourse, like Zhukovskii himself, in culturally productive ways. Like Zhukovskii, they were responding to the dual pressures of the resistance to cultural cross-breeding and the need for new artistic forms that translation might supply – both of which were aspects of the growing demand for a distinctive national literature. What interests me here particularly is the persistence of the competitive aspect of translation in Russian literature, reflected in judgments that certain translations are better than the originals, even in a period when a romantic interest in national specificity was clearly manifest, a situation which Levý does not account for.13 Perhaps the first time this mixture occurs is in the ballad debate of 1816. When Pavel Katenin published his translation of Bürger’s ballad “Lenore” under the title “Ol’ga,” he initiated a polemic with Zhukovskii, who had published his adaptation of the ballad eight years earlier under the title “Liudmila” with the generic subtitle, “A Russian Ballad” (“Russkaia ballada”). At issue was the proper way to make a Russian 12. Levin’s chapter on Zhukovskii as a translator was instrumental in enabling me to formulate an alternative framework for understanding Zhukovskii’s ideas as a translator. But Levin himself works hard to read Zhukovskii as a romantic translator whose apparent classicist trappings are more indicative of certain external coincidence between classicist and romantic conceptions, though he has trouble defining exactly in what Zhukovskii’s romanticism lies (1985: 13–14). Levin’s careful and thorough description of Zhukovskii’s practices as a translator enable one to see beyond this framework, especially as he highlights aspects of the self-other opposition in Zhukovskii’s early articles on translation, in his selection of what to translate, and in his publication practices. Berman’s theorization of translation as an act of opening to an Other, elaborated in the analysis of the German romantics’ writings on translation, has proved most revealing and compelling for my approach to Zhukovskii and his cultural context. 13. Levý notes the “influence of romantic ideology on the fundamental classicist theses” in this period in Czech literature, but does not analyze the nature and specifics of this hybridization (1957: 95). One should be careful not to reify the “classical” and “romantic” categories too dogmatically in any case in such an analysis, for exceptions to Levý’s generalizations are not hard to find. For example, August Wilhelm Schlegel insisted on the necessity of translating Shakespeare’s verse into German verse (not, of course, adapting it to German meters, but following the English meter strictly) (Berman 1992: 130–31). And Novalis, in a letter to Schlegel, concludes, “I am convinced that the German Shakespeare today is better than the English” (105). No one would question the romantic credentials of either author, or the romantic motivation of these translation practices and critical judgments.



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

ballad. Nikolai Gnedich responded to Katenin’s implied polemics with a spirited defense of Zhukovskii’s method of making a Russian ballad: “Liudmila” is a charming, original Russian poem for which only the idea was taken from Bürger. The poet knew that it was possible to make Lenora, a German national (narodnaia) ballad, pleasant for Russian readers in no other way than through imitation. But his imitation did not consist in replacing German proper names, figures and cities with Russian ones. The colors of poetry, the tone of expressions and feelings that make up character and give the figures their physiognomy, turns of phrase, especially those that belong to the simple dialect and distinguish the spirit of the Russian national language – these are the means by which “Lenora” is transformed into “Liudmila.” And since her singer has extraordinary talent, that’s why I like his imitation (in spite of the German words Hurre, hurre, hop, hop, hop if not Klinglingling) more than the work of Bürger itself. (Mordovchenko 1959: 150; Rydel 1984: 387)14

The competition between poets is manifest in this last line, and we should note that Gnedich likes Zhukovskii’s version better in spite of the German words which Zhukovskii kept – he thus places no value on the local color of the original. In Gnedich’s reading, Zhukovskii improved upon the original by making it fit into the aesthetic norms of his Karamzinian group (pleasantness [priiatnost’] and charm [prelest’] are key words). His translation is taken as an original work. Gnedich’s interpretation thus seems to be founded upon classicist ideas of translation.15 But Gnedich is also trying to argue that Zhukovskii’s adaptation is more Russian than Katenin’s translation. National specificity and the making of Russian literature are at issue. Zhukovskii identifies and competes with Bürger as a poet, but his translation is read in the context of a kind of national competition, not so much between the Russian and German nations as between two Russian camps, each of which hopes to define the literary norm of the Russian nation. In order to better see what is new in this debate, we might consider for comparison an earlier classicist analogue to the ballad debate: the first Russian literary competition. In 1744 Mikhailo Lomonosov, Vasilii Trediakovskii, and Aleksandr Sumarokov offered to the Russian literary public (such as it was) their competing versions of translations

14. Mordovchenko does not quote the passage in its entirety, so I have taken the continuation of this passage from an English translation of Gnedich’s article. 15. We should note here the difference from Novalis’s evaluation of A. W. Schlegel’s translation. In Berman’s analysis, Novalis’s judgment is not based on any comparison with the original or any nationalist pride, but the simple fact that Schlegel’s Shakepeare is a translation, a self-conscious poetic act of mimicry. It is better because as an artistic translation, it realizes the potential of the original. As Berman formulates it, “Every Übersetzung is a movement in which the Über is a potentiating going-beyond” (1992: 106–7).

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of Psalm 143 (144 in the English bible).16 The goal of this competition, however, was not to determine which of them was the finest poet, though the aspect of personal poetic competition had a significant role to play. Rather, as Trediakovskii explained in his introduction to the three poems, the goal was to resolve a debate among the participants concerning the proper verse form for the spiritual ode (the genre to which the Psalms were considered to belong), or even whether there was such a proper form. If in the ballad debate the issue was how to make a Russian ballad, here the issue was how to make a spiritual ode or, in fact, any form of high poetry in Russian verse. Lomonosov and Sumarokov maintained that verse forms had inherent qualities that determined their proper generic use; that the iamb, as a meter with rising intonation, communicated loftiness and nobility (vysokost’, blagorodstvo) and was therefore the proper meter for the epic and other high poetic genres while the trochee, a meter with falling intonation, communicated tenderness and pleasant sweetness (nezhnost’, priiatnaia sladost’) and was therefore appropriate to elegiac verse forms (Kunik 1865: 421, 423). Trediakovskii argued that the two meters had no inherent qualities but could both be endowed with either lofty or tender qualities; that the two meters were, in fact, closely related as they both involved the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables (Kunik 1865: 421–22). This competition, then, was to determine if the iamb was the proper meter for the spiritual ode or if the trochee could just as well fulfill the role. Levý notes that, in classicist translations, “foreign poems were usually translated into that verse measure that was considered the most advantageous for serious poetry in the translator’s literature, without regard to the meter of the original” (Levý 1957: 68–69). In Russia, with this competition, translation was even used as a laboratory to help decide this fundamental issue in Russian verse culture: the proper verse form or forms for high poetry. (Or not to decide it: Trediakovskii would leave the question open.)17 As in the ballad debate, the primary competition here is internal to Russian literature. The aspect of competition with King David, while not absent, was tertiary at best (Shishkin 1983: 237), just as Gnedich’s preference for Zhukovskii’s ballad over Bürger’s is a comment in passing, while he is insistent on its superiority to the version of Katenin. In both cases, translations address key questions concerning the Russian verse culture. The ballad debate, however, occurs at a much later developmental stage. Nothing so fundamental as the choice of a proper verse form for high poetry is at stake. Rather, it involves the degree of admissibility of folkloric elements into the poetic culture and the proper manner of their incorporation. While the choice in the psalm translation competition was between two equally Russian meters, in the ballad 16. On the centrality of translation and literary competitions to Russian classicism see Gukovskii (1928). 17. Contemporary verse studies would agree with Trediakovskii that there is no inherent semantics attached to meters. But traditions develop within a literature that create semantic auras for metrical forms. At the time of this competition, however, such auras had had little time to develop in the new Russian verse. See Shishkin (1983: 234).



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

debate both sides argued for the greater Russianness of their poet’s solution. This reflects the ongoing debate initiated by Admiral Shishkov’s 1803 Discourse on the Old and New Style in the Russian Language. Shishkov divided the Russian language from within into native and foreign elements and made the followers of Karamzin out to be Francophile traitors for their creation and employment of foreign elements, such as calques. The ballad debate marks one of the first times that the followers of Karamzin contest the alleged Russianness of the style championed by Admiral Shishkov. Translation, as a site of mediation between the foreign and native cultures, became the ground on which both sides argued the native national quality of their own poetic cultures. What we see in the ballad debate for the first time, I think, is an incremental step toward a new interpretation of the competitive aspect of classicist translation practice, where the national competition is not in the creation of universal poetry, as it was in the classicist paradigm, but in the creation of a markedly national literature. Zhukovskii’s work, at this point, was still largely readable within the parameters of classicist method, even if the aesthetic norms with which he worked were no longer purely classicist. Yet critical responses to his translations, which were already beginning to canonize him as the translator whose translations were better than the originals, also were discovering his translations as a means to respond to the new romantic desire for national specificity. If Gnedich argues that Zhukovskii’s translation is better than Bürger’s original (a classicist commonplace) because it adheres to a Karamzinian sentimentalist diction and that this diction represents the most authentically Russian language (romantic nationalism), we have a seemingly incoherent mix of critical ideas. Yet the classicist commonplace seems here to engage not so much a universal poetics as a growing anxiety in Russian culture about the relationship to the literary centers and the possibility of Russian culture to produce its own native geniuses, a more romantic concern. And if it is laughable today to argue that Zhukovskii’s Russian is more authentic than the folkloric discourse employed by Katenin, Gnedich at least acknowledges in his argument the concern with the national qualities of the language, which had been raised by Shishkov and his associates, rather than simply dismissing it with Arzamasian laughter.18 Karamzin’s younger followers, with Pushkin in the lead, would ultimately define the national language in a compromise between the Karamzinian and Shishkovite discourses. Gnedich here gives definite impulse to the development of romantic ideas in the inner circles of the aristocratic Russian literary culture.

18. We should note what a strange attempt at the Russianization of a German ballad Zhukovskii’s first version is: he left in certain German onomatopoetic phrases and he offered no concrete Russian historical setting for the poem to replace Bürger’s Franco-Prussian war setting. His Russian setting is highly abstract: he offers but one toponym (Nareva – the Lithuanian name for a tributary of the Narev river in Belarus), no historical markers, and gives his heroine a name, Liudmila, that was hardly in use in Russia at the time but belonged to a Czech saint. And it is on the basis of this text that the Karamzinians began to argue for the Russianness of their style – style, more than substance, clearly being the main issue.

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A similar aspect is presented by the contemporaneous debates on hexameter, in that a classicist competitive gesture takes on a new, romantic valence. Now, if translating verse into verse is a common classicist method, with a competitive moment, and translating verse into prose is a common romantic method, marked as subordinating, what sort of method is translating prose into verse? It may be hypercompetitive, as it marks itself as a clear attempt to outdo the original and reflects an approach in which resistance overwhelms the mediational act of translation (the very form of the original work is rejected). In the Russian context, such an approach had a rather notorious classicist precedent: Trediakovskii’s Tilemakhida (1766). Trediakovskii’s translation of François Fénelon’s novel Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699) rendered Fénelon’s prose in Russian hexameters. In his introduction to the translation, Trediakovskii justifies his method by an extended discourse on the epic genre in which he makes numerous arguments that the hexameter poetic form is essential.19 His improvement upon the original, that is, his rendering it in hexameter, thus responds to a normative aesthetics, and his competitive gesture can be read as within the bounds of classicist method. He reveals his intent to outdo Fénelon in the end of his introduction when he indicates that he hoped through his translation “to lead readers to a level from which they could see themselves how worthy of admiration and reverence are the Hellenic poet Homer and the Latin Virgil: for Fénelon’s Télémaque presents them with all their beauty, stateliness, and pithiness (del’nost’), while my Tilemakhida pours forth all their smoothness and pleasantness with the same sweetness, being of similar flow of words” (1849: 2: lxxviii). Assuming that his translation was able to render the beauty, stateliness, and pithiness of Fénelon’s original, it would be his work alone and not Fénelon’s that would enable readers to appreciate Homer and Virgil. We have already noted that there is an aspect of national competition in classicist translation, and this is certainly true of Trediakovskii’s work. He suggests that Fénelon wrote in prose because French verse was inappropriate to the epic and incapable of imitating the Greek and Latin hexameter, being rhymed (2: xlvii, li). The Russian language was not so limited, however, and so it would be inappropriate not to make use of the opportunity. There is a competition here between verse cultures and national languages. This was not lost upon the early nineteenth century. It is not a coincidence that the other debate of the 1810s that, like the ballad debate, invoked the prospect of a Russian national literature was the debate over Russian hexameter. In 1813 the young Count Sergei Uvarov suggested to Gnedich that he translate the Iliad into Russian hexameters, instead of the Alexandrines with which he had begun, and argued that this would help the Russians to free themselves from the imitation of French forms and enable the creation of a truly national literature (Uvarov 1994: 82). Trediakovskii lingers behind much of the discussion in the hexameter debate, whether as a hidden ally or as an accusation to be thrown at one’s opponent, and the example of the 19. Note that Trediakovskii no longer believes that high verse genres can accept multiple verse forms, as he argued in the 1744 debate.



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

Tilemakhida was given a new relevance. Uvarov draws heavily on Trediakovskii in order to highlight the lack of resistance in the Russian language to the forms of Greek prosody, which suggests to him a certain kinship between the two nations. Ideas of Russian and Greek kinship go far back in Russian culture, always with religious, political, and ideological implications. But in the years since Trediakovskii’s “improvements” on Fénelon, European romantics had rediscovered the Greeks as an original nation that first gave form to an original national literature. For Trediakovskii hexameter was the essential form of the epic as a distinct and well-defined classical genre. For Uvarov, the argument of form goes beyond the question of genre and touches upon the natural and distinctive essence of any national literature: “If we want to raise the dignity of our language, if we want to aspire to having a national literature (slovesnost’ narodnuiu) truly proper to us, then let us stop writing or translating the epos in Alexandrine verses; let us stop weighing down the youth of our literature with the heavy chains of French taste. If we do not return to the true character of our language; if we do not create a metrical system based on the very spirit of the language; if we will not have the means to resurrect the prosody of our ancient versification, then without a doubt there is reason to fear that in a very short time our poetry will resemble an infant bearing all the signs of decrepitude or a withered youth” (Uvarov 1994: 82).20 In some ways the hexameter debate is more fundamental than the ballad debate. Epic was considered, in analogy with the model Greek literature, to be the foundation of a national literature, and a false (that is, nonnative) footing here was seen as crippling. If in the ballad debate nothing so fundamental as a proper meter was at stake, the hexameter debate reopened such questions in an attempt to reground Russian verse culture on its own soil, whether that be hexameter (based on the fictional identity of ancient Russian versification with the ancient Greek, first elaborated by Trediakovskii), or another verse form (Aleksandr Vostokov, even as he gave a privileged place to hexameter, suggested that the accentual bylina meter was the true, ancient Russian epic meter). While not openly involved in the hexameter debate, Zhukovskii was one of those most affected by it. He began to experiment with the hexameter form and would use it with more variety and for more types of poetry than any of his contemporaries, including in his monumental translation of the Odyssey. But even before the Odyssey, he used hexameter for the translation of a novel in prose: his Undina, a translation of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s German novel (1811), which he worked on from 1831 to 1836.21 At the same time, Zhukovskii was returning to some of his earlier translations, including Bürger’s “Lenore” and Gray’s “Elegy,” and reworking them in a more exact form that conveyed far more of the national specificity of the originals. This is sometimes 20. Uvarov makes use here of a mythological picture of Russian youth in opposition to French age that would become prominent in Slavophile writings. 21. Zhukovskii first read the novel in the fall of 1816, that is, in the midst of the debates on the ballad and hexameter, and had long planned on translating the work (Zhukovskii 1960: 2: 482).

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taken as evidence of his conversion to a more romantic conception of translation, though Maurice Friedberg skeptically refers to Zhukovskii’s “alleged conversion to the Romantic doctrine” (1997: 44). There seems to be a contradiction between the continued willful adaptation of the Undina translation and the revised translations that move closer to the originals. In order to understand Zhukovskii’s contradictory strategies, one has to take into account the changing Russian literary context, with the national question moving from the literary periphery of the 1810s to become the most vexed problem of Russian letters. Russia’s leading poet in the 1810s, Zhukovskii was given an important role in the development of the “national literature,” a new critical concern, and his translations were praised as original works. Already by the early 1820s, however, Pushkin and others began to complain of Zhukovskii’s lack of originality. In 1822 Pushkin wrote to Gnedich concerning Zhukovskii’s translation of Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon: “The translation est tour de force. ... It seems to me that Zhukovskii’s style has recently become much more virile (uzhasno vozmuzhal), though it has lost some of its original charm. ... God grant that he begin to create!” (Veselovskii 1999: 262).22 Vil’gel’m Kiukhel’beker in 1824 would directly blame Zhukovskii for the false romanticism and monotonous elegiac tone of Russian poetry and suggest that if Zhukovskii had helped to liberate the Russian muse from its servitude to the French muse, it was only to enslave it again to the German one. His view of the role of translation in creating an original literature seems to be a direct attack on Zhukovskii: By studying nature, by their strength, by their excess and variety of feelings, images, language and thoughts, by the narodnost’ of their works, the great poets of Greece, the East, and Britain have carved their names indelibly into the annals of immortality. Can we really hope that we will compare to them by following the path we are on now? No one translates a translator, except our work-a-day translators. An imitator does not know inspiration: he speaks not from the depths of his own soul, but forces himself to retell others’ ideas and feelings. (Kiukhel’beker 1979: 456)

That same year, in a draft of a reply to the second of Aleksandr Bestuzhev’s “Surveys” for the almanac Poliarnaia zvezda, Pushkin said, “I agree that ... all the nations (iazyki) would have translated Zhukovskii, if he himself had translated less” (Pushkin 1964: 7: 19). The cultural resistance to translation in the 1820s clearly was beginning to outweigh any benefit translation was perceived to confer. Kiukhel’beker’s attack in particular marks the growing resistance to cultural hybridization, be it with French or German culture – in 1817 he had praised Zhukovskii for giving “a German spirit to the Russian language, closest to our national spirit” (Levin 1985: 18–19). A new term had been introduced into the 1820s Russian critical vocabulary: narodnost’. And while critics could not agree on what exactly the term implied, all agreed on its necessity. This was the necessity of national originality, of a literature that was 22. Letter dated September 27, 1822.



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

Russian in its essence (Cooper 2004: ch. 3). In its extreme form, the resistance to hybridization led to prominent judgments that rejected all of Russian literary and cultural development, and especially the culture of the eighteenth century. Examples include Dmitrii Venevitinov (1826), Petr Chaadaev (1829), and Vissarion Belinskii (1834). With place in Russian literature in question and his originality in doubt, Zhukovskii may have returned in the early 1830s to his translations of Gray’s “Elegy” and Bürger’s “Lenore” with a desire to better distinguish his earlier translations from the work of the original authors and highlight his own original contributions, rather than out of any kind of conversion to a more romantic method of translation. Zhukovskii also returned in general to the literary scene with the publication of Ballady i povesti (1831). And if the critical response did not restore him to a central place in the development of an original Russian literature, it did at least acknowledge a certain kind of originality and began to better formulate an idea of his special creative gifts. Nikolai Polevoi in particular noted the prevalence of Zhukovskii’s own concerns in all of the works, including his translations: One thought, one idea interests our poet: he takes it without distinction from Uland, Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Hebel; he uses hexameter equally for Ovid, Klopstock, and Hebel. ... Look through his romances and songs, for the most part translated by Zhukovskii – one and the same thought, one and the same dream. ... Different variations from Bürger, Moncrieff, Goldsmith, Schiller, all on one theme – the melancholy of love (toska liubvi), quiet joy, the victim of love, the meeting beyond the grave! (Levin 1985: 19)

And in his first critical article, the “Literary Reveries” of 1834, Vissarion Belinskii would write that “those who consider him an imitator of the Germans and English are wrong: he would not have written any differently had he not known them, had he only wanted to be true to himself. ... He was shut up inside himself: and this is the cause of his one-dimensionality (odnostoronnost’), which in him is originality in the highest degree” (Belinskii 1976: 1:87). These evaluations are, in the end, not very flattering, and both Belinskii and Polevoi agreed that Zhukovskii lacked the one element that was most wanted in the 1830s: narodnost’. Belinskii continued, “But at the same time he’s not the type of poet that could be called a Russian poet, properly speaking, whose name could be proclaimed at the European tournament, where they compete with their national glories (narodnye slavy)” (1:88).23 The Undina translation may be a reply to such criticism. The competitive gesture is manifest in the transformation of prose into verse, and further encoded by the implicit invocation of Trediakovskii’s work. With the question of the national literature and its narodnost’ on center stage and with the hexameter form so intimately connected with the rise of this concern in Russia, Zhukovskii’s competitive gesture can 23. For Polevoi on Zhukovskii’s lack of narodnost’ see Veselovskii (1999: 27–28).

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hardly be read within the “classicist” scheme. He seems, rather, to be attempting to compete “at the European tournament” on behalf of the Russian nation with its “national glories.”

Gogol intervenes It would be Nikolai Gogol who, in close dialogue with Zhukovskii, would return him to a central place in the development of the national literature and to one of the highest places on the Russian Parnassus – at the same time elevating translation to an unprecedented position in the national culture. Gogol’s interpretation of Zhukovskii is formed in the matrix of Zhukovskii’s continued competitive gesturing and the insistent concern of the times with national specificity. His reading of Zhukovskii’s translations is highly paradoxical as a result. In his 1846 discussion of Zhukovskii’s translation of the Odyssey, he begins with this high evaluation of the original work: “The Odyssey captures the entire ancient world, public and domestic life, all of the domains of the people of that time, with their trades, knowledge and beliefs ... in a word, it is even hard to say what the Odyssey might not have embraced or what may have been left out of it” (Gogol 1978: 6: 204). What interests him in the work, then, is what interested most romantics, its specificity to its context – in this case ancient Greece. And just as typically, he wants the translation to render that specificity. Zhukovskii’s translation satisfied him on that account, and then some. He calls Zhukovskii’s work “not a translation, but rather a recreation, a restoration, a resurrection of Homer. It is as if the translation introduces one to ancient life even more than the original. It is as if the translator invisibly became an interpreter of Homer, as if he became some kind of optical explanatory glass before the reader, through which all of his innumerable treasures show themselves even more distinctly and clearly” (6:205). Gogol creates for us here a new and paradoxical paradigm for translation. The translation is better than the original, not because it makes the work conform to the contemporary universal aesthetic norms but because it transmits the individual and national specificity of the original more readily even than the original work itself. It is better than the original at communicating the qualities of the original. Here we have a new romantic interpretation of translation that, far from subordinating the translation to the original, rather elevates the translation to new heights.24 In Gogol’s paradigm, the aspect of national competition that was a part of classicist translation is not lost, but only transformed. “The fate of the Odyssey,” he tells us, “is 24. New, perhaps, only in the Russian context. Friedrich Schlegel had suggested that “in order to translate perfectly the ancient into the modern, the translator would have to have such mastery of the latter as to be able to make everything modern; but at the same time he would have to understand antiquity so well that he would be able not just to imitate it but, if necessary, to re-create it” (Berman 1992: 107). And Novalis’s evaluation of A. W. Schlegel’s Shakespeare involves a similar judgment concerning the potentiating function of translation.



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

strange: in Europe they did not appreciate it; at fault in part is lack of a translation that would artistically transmit the supreme work of antiquity; in part lack of a language rich and full to such a degree that all the innumerable and elusive beauties of Homer himself and of the Hellenic language in general would be reflected; in part, finally, lack of a nation itself gifted to such a degree with the purity of virginal taste necessary in order to feel Homer” (1978: 6:204). The Russians had known at least since the time of Trediakovskii and Lomonosov that the Russian language was equal to the Hellenic one, and Zhukovskii had now provided a more-than-adequate translation – or at least half of one: only the first twelve books had been completed at the time – Gogol was doing advanced publicity, among other things. What remained to be seen, besides the second half, was the reaction of the Russian nation. Gogol fully expected a profound transformation of Russian life and letters to result. He believed the Russian nation to be equal to the task. And his expectations are really only a kind of magnification of those of Sergei Uvarov, who awaited a truly national Russian literature to result from the development of hexameter, and ultimately of Trediakovskii, who expected his Tilemakhida to transform Russian literature. Where Trediakovskii competed to show the superiority of the Russian language and Russian poetry, however, Gogol expected Zhukovskii’s translation to also demonstrate the superiority of the Russian nation itself. We should note again a certain irony in the choice of translations upon which to base such expectations: Zhukovskii translated not from the Greek itself but from a German interlinear translation. Yet Gogol was far from alone in founding great expectations upon it. Viazemskii, Pletnev, Shevyrev, and the Aksakovs all had their own hopes of literary and cultural transformation. Vinitskii has suggested that the translation had its greatest effect when it was still awaited (Vinitskii 2003: 173 n. 7). Zhukovskii himself harbored high expectations and frequently underlined the paradox that the revival of Homer was to be achieved by a poet who knew no ancient Greek (Vinitskii 2003: 180).25 Gogol further refined his picture of Zhukovskii in another article from later that same year, entitled “What, Ultimately, Is the Essence of Russian Poetry and What Is Its Particularity?” – questions that had been asked innumerable times in the preceding two and a half decades. In that article, Gogol recasts the question of the nation’s qualities. He is no longer waiting for the response to Zhukovskii’s Odyssey because the ability of Zhukovskii to translate in such a paradoxically superior manner is already indicative of a certain quality and mission of the Russian nation. He writes, “Such a poet could only have appeared amidst the Russian nation, in which the genius of receptivity is so strong, a genius given to that nation, perhaps, in order to set properly all those gems that are not appreciated, not polished, and neglected by other nations”(Gogol 1978: 6: 342). If a translation can be an original, national work, then translation itself can be generalized as a special ability of the nation and turned into its mission. Gogol

25. For Zhukovskii’s expectations see Veselovskii (1999: 349, 351, 354).

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sees the mission of the Russian nation to be the refinement and perfection of the ideas and creations of other nations.26 Gogol also further develops the paradoxical aspects of the nature of Zhukovskii’s translations. In the article on the Odyssey, Gogol had emphasized the translation as a window to the original author and his milieu. Now he adds the opposite side to that coin as well: Zhukovskii in his translations gives us at the same time a clear picture of his own poetic personality. Zhukovskii always remains himself even as he is the perfect medium for communicating the individuality of the original work and author (Gogol 1978: 6:342). Gogol here combines ideas from a variety of sources, including earlier formulations of Zhukovskii’s particular artistic genius, discussions of narodnost’, and the myth of the protean poet. What drives this new synthesis, I would argue, is Gogol’s attempt to define the special place of Pushkin in Russian literature, in relation to Zhukovskii and also in relation to Goethe. Orest Somov, in his book On Romantic Poetry in 1823, made Goethe a primary example, along with Schiller and Bürger, of how to give a literature narodnost’. Goethe’s example is unique, however, because his imagination did not limit itself to national topics. Somov transmits to the Russian public the myth of Goethe as a protean author in a form condensed from the formulation of Madame de Staël. “In his Elegies, written in Rome,” Somov writes, “he makes us breathe, it seems, the air of Italy, narrates his pleasures and it is as if he becomes a Roman. If he speaks of Greece, in his verses you feel some kind of co-presence of the ancient sons of Hellas with their beliefs, customs and superstitions” (Somov 1823: 58; de Staël 1814: 1:314 ff.). And in Somov’s use of the example, Goethe’s ability to imagine himself into distant times and places did not make him some kind of a-national author, but rather a national author of the finest sort, one who gives a recognizable particularity to the national literature. One can see how such an example would appeal to Gogol in thinking about the significance of Zhukovskii’s translations and of Pushkin’s genius. In 1832 he had written of Pushkin that “from the very beginning he was national, because true nationality (natsional’nost’) consists not in the description of a sarafan, but in the very spirit of a people. A poet can even be national when he is describing a completely strange world, but looks at it with the eyes of his national element, with the eyes of the whole people, when he feels and speaks so that it seems to his fellow countrymen that they are themselves feeling and speaking” (Gogol 1978: 6:64). He thus emphasized the way in which Pushkin remained Russian in approaching the foreign element. Pushkin himself had defined narodnost’ in his 1825 article in just such a manner with Shakespeare as an example, perhaps even in polemics with Somov’s use of the term in relation to Goethe 26. Here, too, this new mission for the Russian nation reflects ideas developed by the German romantics (Berman 1992: 11–12 and passim). Such observations in no way contradict the originality of Gogol’s formulation and contribution. The German idea of the protean nation had been available to Russian writers and critics for a long time before Gogol found a way to convincingly argue that it was characteristic of the Russian nation, and thus to give the idea to the Russians as one of their own.



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

(Pushkin 1964: 7:38). However, the example of Goethe and Somov’s reading of his narodnost’ suggested a new possibility, especially when juxtaposed to the special receptivity of Zhukovskii.27 In the article on the particularity of Russian literature, then, Gogol gives to Pushkin the attributes of the protean poet: “In Spain he is a Spaniard, with a Greek – a Greek, in the Caucasus he is a free mountain dweller in the full sense of the word” (Gogol 1978: 6:347). But Gogol had to separate Pushkin from Zhukovskii and from Goethe as well. He does so by making Pushkin a protean poet who becomes so because he ultimately lacks his own personality, his own stable self. He writes, Even Goethe, that Proteus of poets, who strove to encompass everything in the world of nature as well as in the world of the sciences, demonstrated in that very scientific striving his own personality, filled with a kind of German orderliness and a German theoretical pretension to harmonize with all times and ages. All of our Russian poets: Derzhavin, Zhukovskii, Batiushkov, retained their own personality. Only Pushkin lacks it. What can you grasp about him himself from his works? Go find his character as a human being! Instead of him what comes to the fore is that strange picture, responsive to everything and finding no response only to itself. (Gogol 1978: 6:345)28

This formulation of Pushkin’s particularity and of the mission and nature of the Russian nation proved to be a compelling one for Russian intellectuals and had its reverberations well into the twentieth century (Wachtel 1999). It would find its apogee in Dostoevskii’s speech during the celebration of the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin in 1880. In Dostoevskii’s formulation, Pushkin is the only true protean poet, who can only have come out of the Russian nation. All others had to lack that special ability so that it could be made characteristic of the Russian nation: In fact, the European literatures had creative geniuses of immense magnitude – Shakespeares, Cervanteses and Schillers. But show me even one of those great geniuses who possessed such a capacity of universal responsiveness as our Pushkin. And it is this very capacity, the chief capacity of our nationality (natsional’nost’), that he shares with our people (narod); and it is in this, above all, that he is a national (narodnyi) poet. The very greatest of the European poets could never embody in themselves with such force the genius of another, even a neighboring, people (narod), its spirit, all the hidden depths of that spirit and all its longing to fulfill its calling. On the contrary, when dealing with other national groups (narodnosti), European poets most often reincarnated them in their own 27. I do not suggest here that Gogol was reading Somov in the 1840s, but rather that Somov had articulated a certain conception of the protean poet in relation to a national literature that entered into the Russian discourse and was available to Gogol. 28. Gogol here invokes Pushkin’s poem “Ekho” (1831), which compares the poet to an echo. But the idea that the poet is without a personality of his own seems to be Gogol’s problem, not Pushkin’s theme. In writing about Pushkin, Gogol often was speaking of himself. See Fanger (1979: 69–72).

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nationality (natsional’nost’) and understood them in their own way. Even with Shakespeare his Italians, for example, remain almost entirely Englishmen. Pushkin alone of all the world poets possesses the quality of re-embodying himself entirely in another nationality (natsional’nost’). (Dostoevskii 1984: 26:145–46)

The example of Shakespeare is straight out of Pushkin’s article on narodnost’, in which he defined the term, as I have already mentioned, in a manner opposed to the capacity of the protean poet: in the poet’s ability to always remain himself and a representative of his own nationality.29 But it is interesting that in his list of world poets Dostoevskii chooses to mention Schiller rather than Goethe. He avoided the known example of the protean poet, from which the image of Pushkin had been derived. The implicit demotion of Goethe in his protean aspect mirrors what had happened to the term narodnost’ in the 1830s and 1840s in Slavophile discourse: no longer was narodnost’ an attribute of German, English, or other European literatures to be copied, rather, it was an ideal that the Russian nation alone could achieve. “The West,” with its analytical, inorganic, individualistic, and abstracted way of life, could not hope to attain it. While Dostoevskii is here proposing a cultural mission that would transcend the Slavophile-Westernizer split, he nonetheless performs an analogous operation on the topos of the protean poet, denying its prestige to the poets and nations that formerly modeled it to Russian culture. Yet this is more than analogy because, for Dostoevskii, Pushkin’s narodnost’ was so intimately bound up with his universal responsiveness – Pushkin is the national poet of the protean nation. In some sense Dostoevskii simply repeats the Slavophile gesture of denial, with the term narodnost’ now connected to the utopian cultural mission of becoming a universal human people. In arguing that this is the exclusive cultural mission of the Russian nation, Dostoevskii tacitly passes over Goethe, whose name may have invoked for listeners similar associations in relation to the German nation.

Conclusion National competition in a kind of generalized cultural translation is manifest in Dostoevskii’s myth of Pushkin. This national ideology of translation had part of its genesis in a certain mixing of “classicist” and “romantic” ideas by Russian critics who were articulating their opinions on the translations of Zhukovskii. The influential practice of Zhukovskii as a translator is thus essential to the formation of this discourse at both the earliest and latest stages. Surprisingly, the persistent Russian critical tradition that 29. In fact, Dostoevskii here contradicts what Pushkin himself said in another note on Romeo and Juliet about Shakespeare’s ability to transmit the Italianness of the setting: “The Italy contemporary to the poet is reflected in it, along with its climate, passions, festivals, languor, sonnets, and its sumptuous language, full of flash and concetti. To such a degree Shakespeare grasped dramatic local color (mestnost’)” (Pushkin 1964: 7:94).



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 

upholds Zhukovskii as an ideal translator and his translations as better than the originals took shape in a period when a romantic interest in national literary specificity was becoming the norm. Zhukovskii’s own views on translation were also initially articulated in the terms of classicist discourse, though transformed by attention to the translator’s self as a creator. His mature self-assessments inscribed a relation of the self to a foreign other in a manner that challenged the conventional boundary between the original work and the translation that underlay both the “classicist” and “romantic” discourses on translation. His translation practice was formed at a time when, in the words of Toporov, “the inhabitation of the ‘foreign/other’ and the accustomization to it (obzhivanie ‘chuzhogo’ i vzhivanie v nego) ... took on a particular character, defined by seriousness and ... by its premise (ustanovkoi na to) that ‘the other’ also models ‘one’s self ’ and therefore contains some kind of omen, prophecy” (Toporov 1981: 246; quoted in Vinitskii 1997: 260). It is not surprising, then, that Zhukovskii’s translations played a significant role in helping Russian critics to define the Russian national self and its mission in relation to the European other. What can the case of Zhukovskii contribute to the study of translation and translation theory? Zhukovskii belongs to a small group of exemplary author-translators, writers for whom translation played a central role in defining their creative activity. His authorial trajectory and self-conception respond in a complex manner to the needs of a particular moment in Russian literary culture, when the demand for original works of a recognizably national stamp required the new genre and language forms that translation could provide. It was a moment when the cultural resistance to translation as a form of cross-breeding was growing rapidly, even as the same demands for a national literature necessitated new forms that translation could help to provide. In the tension between these conflicting demands, Zhukovskii charted a course that responded to both, with translations that offered fruitful new genre and language forms to Russian literature (he introduced the romantic elegy, ballad, and Byronic verse tale) even as they resisted translation by taking creative liberties with the text and mediating the text through the translator’s authorial persona. At the same time, in his self-evaluations Zhukovskii challenged theories of translation, both classicist and romantic, that opposed the original and the translation, insisting on a kernel of shared identity. The new attention being given to the creative aspect of translation can benefit from an examination of Zhukovskii’s case.30 Furthermore, the reception of Zhukovskii’s work, which develops in the same cultural matrix of intensifying resistance to translation and the need for translation, leads to a similar revaluation of translation as a creative process that can be embraced not only as formative of individual, authorial identity but also as a part of national identity and the national cultural mission. Here, too, the resistance to translation is deeply imbedded in this new understanding of “translation” as a form of cultural appropriation and one-upsmanship. Dostoevskii’s myth of Pushkin as the protean poet of a 30. See, for example, the recent volume edited by Loffredo and Perteghella.

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protean nation takes the role that translation definitely played in the formation of a recognizably Russian national literature and elevates it to the status of the cultural mission of the Russian nation. At the same time, it is abundantly clear that the opening to the Other that constitutes true translation is not at all necessary to Dostoevskii’s version of Russia’s messianic mission to humanity. Nineteenth-century Russia offers rich material to students of the cultural and historical roles played by translation.

Works cited Belinskii, V. G. 1976. Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Berman, Antoine. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Trans. S. Heyvaert. Albany: State University of New York Press. Burgi, Richard. 1954. A History of the Russian Hexameter. Hamden, CT: The Shoe String Press. Cooper, David Lee. 2004. “Inventing a National Literature: Czech and Russian Criticism, 1800– 1830.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University. Dostoevskii, Fedor. 1984. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: Nauka. Egunov, A. N. 2001. Gomer v russkikh perevodakh XVIII-XIX vekov. Moscow: Indrik. Fanger, Donald. 1979. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Friedberg, Maurice. 1997. Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Gogol’, Nikolai. 1978. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Gukovskii, G. A. 1928. “K voprosu o russkom klassitsisme: Sostiazaniia i perevody.” In Poetika: Sbornik statei 4: 126–48. Leningrad: Akademia. Kiukhel’beker, Vil’gel’m K. 1979. Puteshestvie, dnevnik, stat’i. N. V. Koroleva and V. D. Rak (eds.). Leningrad: Nauka. Kunik, A. 1865. Sbornik materialov dlia istorii Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk v XVIII veke. St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk. Levin, Iurii D. 1985. Russkie perevodchiki XIX veka i razvitie khudozhestvennogo perevoda. Leningrad: Nauka. Levý, Jiří. 1957. České theorie překladu. Prague: Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury, hudby a umění. Loffredo, Eugenia, and Manuela Perteghella. 2008. Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies. London: Continuum, 2006. Mordovchenko, N. I. 1959. Russkaia kritika pervoi chetverti XIX veka. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR. Pushkin, Aleksandr S. 1964. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Moscow: Nauka. Shishkin, A. B. 1983 . “Poeticheskoe sostiazanie Trediakovskogo, Lomonosova, i Sumarokova” XVIII Vek 14: 232–46. Somov, Orest. 1823. O romanticheskoi poezii: Opyt v trekh stat’iakh. St. Petersburg: Imperatorskii Vospitatelnyi Dom. Staël, Madame de. 1814. De l’Allemagne, 2nd ed. Paris: Chez H. Nicolle, à la Librairie Stérotype. Toporov, V. N. 1981. “‘Sel’skoe kladbishche’ Zhukovskogo: K istokam russkoi poezii.” Russian Literature 10: 207–86. Trediakovskii, Vasilii. 1849. Sochineniia. St. Petersburg: Aleksandr Smirdin.



Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation  Tynianov, Iurii N. 1969. “Arkhaisty i Pushkin.” In Pushkin i ego sovremenniki, 23–121. Moscow: Nauka. Uvarov, Sergei. 1994. “Pis’mo k Nikolaiu Ivanovichu Gnedichu o grecheskom ekzametre.” In “Arzamas,” Kniga vtoraia, Iz literaturnogo naslediia “Arzamasa,” 78–83. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Veselovskii, Aleksandr Nikolaevich. 1999. V. A. Zhukovskii: Poeziia chuvstva i “serdechnogo voobrazheniia.” Moscow: Intrada. (Originally 1904) Vinitskii, Il’ia. 1997. Utekhi melankholii. Moscow: Izdatel’svto Moskovskogo kul’turologicheskogo litseia. –—. 2003. “Teodisseia Zhukovskogo: Gomerovskii epos i revoliutsiia 1848–1849 godov.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 60: 171–93. Wachtel, Andrew. 1999. “Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia.” Public Culture 11: 1. Zhukovskii, V. A. 1960. Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury. –—. 1985. Estetika i kritika. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Zorin, Andrei L. 1995–96. “U istokov russkogo germanofil’stva (Andrei Turgenev i Druzheskoe literaturnoe obshchestvo).” In Novye bezdelki: Sbornik statei k 60-letiiu V. E. Vatsuro, edited by S. I. Panov, 7–35. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.

Romania as Europe’s translator Translation in Constantin Noica’s national imagination Sean Cotter

University of Texas at Dallas, USA Constantin Noica’s philosophy is prominent in multiple domains in Romania, from metaphysics, to cultural politics. The connections between these domains have been heavily contested and confused, in part because of a central paradox: his nationalism is a type of internationalism, his concern with definitions of Romania is a concern, first of all, with the country’s connections with the West. Noica’s international nationalism informs two important aspects of his thought: his refusal to adopt a dissident stance toward Ceauşescu, and his definition of Romania as “Europe’s translator.” This chapter defines Noica’s internationalism through an analysis of his rhetoric of translation from the 1970s and his practice of translation in the 1930s. In particular, I examine his 1973 assertion that Romania is “Europe’s translator” alongside his 1938 translation of Sagittarius Rising, Cecil Day Lewis’s autobiography. Translation is key to his intellectual formation before World War Two, and it remains central to his thinking about Romanian language and culture during the Communist period. Translations are the laboratory in which he develops his negative relationship with Europe. Noica’s positions are not, strictly speaking, “post-colonial.” Rather, they are characteristic of a small country’s necessary engagement with the terms of major countries, the international perspective inherent in the cultural self-image of a minor nation.

Translation is a central concern for the “minor” countries of Eastern Europe, small geographical areas with relatively countries few native speakers in each language. The anxiety of minor status, at the crossroads of empires, extends to a mistrust of translation’s globalizing reach. Translation into English, German, or Russian can be read as the translation out of national specificity, the end of a national idea. Yet a minor country can never be truly insular. Because of its minor status, it must interact with major countries and cultures (an awareness that the major is not obligated to share). The minor

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country constantly faces the practical need for translation in order to be understood abroad and to digest major cultural texts at home. Examining practices and rhetorics of translation, therefore, places our attention on the central ambivalences of the minor national imagination, the desire for both national particularity and international recognition, the pragmatic engagement with major cultures from a position of political weakness, the combination of superiority and inferiority Paul Cernat has called “the periphery complex” (2007). The study of translation demonstrates the extent to which a minor national imagination is, by necessity, an international imagination. Nowhere are the paradoxes of an international imagination more apparent than in the work of the Romanian philosopher of language and culture, Constantin Noica (1909–1987). This claim would seem strange to most of his readers as Noica is known for his insistence on the particular utility of the Romanian language to the philosophy of being, his over-riding concern with the fate of Romania, his devotion to Romania’s “national” Romantic poet, Mihai Eminescu, and his arguments for Romanian linguistic specificity. All of which are said to stem from his pre-World War Two allegiance to Romania’s fascist party. To claim, as I do, that his philosophy and nationalism are expressed in a consistently international series of metaphors and habits of thought, seems at best to argue against the central theses of the author of Romanian Philosophical Speech, and at worst to attempt a redemption of his youthful right-wing stance. A traditional reading would concede that he transcends national boundaries only in order to focus on the universal. For example, Noica says of his close friend, Emil Cioran: If he had continued to dig into Romanian grief until he found its ‘in(to)’ [Noica’s pet preposition], in which even the Japanese can recognize themselves, then he would have obtained the universal in its classic variant, through the idiomatic. (Liiceanu 1998: 180)1

The universal, however, is not the international. The universal would collapse the difference between Romania and Japan, in a Platonic preference for the immutable realm of truth. I am interested in the way Noica’s experiences of specific national and cultural events, for example, his imprisonment in Communist Romania and the attitudes toward dissidence in the Parisian diaspora, inform his cultural production. Noica’s experiences so shape the rhetoric of his philosophy that I have to question standard readings of his nationalism. The fact of Noica’s support of the Legionnaire movement obscures our view of the particular contours of his “passion for Romania” and the insights into minor national imagination his case can provide. Noica’s international nationalism informs two important aspects of his thought: his refusal to adopt a dissident stance toward Ceauşescu, and his definition of Romania as “Europe’s translator.” Noica’s case challenges our frame for thinking of political action under Communism. One might claim that if Noica were thinking internationally and fascistically, he would have in mind the Soviet military power that installed the Communist regime 1.

All translations are my own.



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and remained in the country from 1944 to 1958. Noica makes only rare references to the Soviet Union, however, and not even oblique or coded references to Russia. Instead, he engages the colonizations of Romania, in the plural, including the cultural influence of the West, from Paris to “the Little Paris” of Bucharest. Thus, rather than fitting the Cold War template for Romanian political history, which prioritizes the relationship of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, Noica’s case challenges the template by privileging his contentious relationship with “the West,” his unexpected resistance to his Paris friends. Even for Romanianists, Noica represents a challenge. We are used to the idea that Ceauşescu pursued a “maverick” position, beginning with his criticism of 1968’s Prague Spring, and resisted the position of “satellite.” Noica then should have engaged the nationalistic rhetoric of the Communist government. Noica had the authority, understanding, and public support to speak against Ceauşescu, yet he never does so. Katherine Verdery, in the first extensive analysis of Noica’s career, explains the opposition between the Romanian state’s use of nationalist discourse and the work of Noica and his followers (Verdery 1991, chapter seven). Her brilliant and influential book addresses the political importance of his “school,” those “Păltinişeni” who studied informally at his home in the mountain town of Păltiniş. Verdery argues that his commitment to professional levels of philosophical work forms an implicit resistance to the pseudo-philosophy of official Marxism. In particular, she refers to his editions of translations during the 1970s: Noica and his followers toiled away endlessly at translations of Plato, Heidegger, Hegel, and so on, just as other laboriously translated Hume, Habermas, Peirce, and Bourdieu, not to mention Shakespeare, Marquez, Eco, and hosts of other foreign writers. ...Translations, therefore, were part of creating a larger public for culture, a sort of raising of the spiritual standard of living, parallel to the state’s claims to raise the material standard of living. At the same time, however, they were like “viruses” loosed into the mechanism by which culture was officially transmitted. They were a form of political action. (Verdery 1991: 294–95)

Verdery’s reading sets the terms for much of the post-1989 debate over Noica’s legacy, which has centered on the legitimacy of this kind of resistance – the question of whether culture, generally speaking, is an effective response to political oppression, and whether the Păltinişeni were effective on their own terms. As Verdery acknowledges, this question shifts attention from Noica to the broader cultural effects of the Noicans, to their efforts as a kind of resistance. Verdery’s approach is to identify Noica an to “ambiguous character” and to write “the sociology of his fame” rather than on Noica himself (Verdery 1991: 260, 59). Finding a frame for Noica’s national positions, therefore, offers scholars of this period a useful tool. Noica does not fit the strategies of discursive resistance outlined by Verdery. Noica himself argued against the utility of translations for the general public, and he framed his cultural activity as a kind of collaboration with the state. Noica,

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in this sense, is not a Noican. In 1972, according to Monica Lovinescu, Noica tells a group of Romanians in Paris: I have eliminated ethics from my world, and I believe that the great mistake of Romanian intellectuals during the Phanariot period, to have not collaborated with their masters, should not be repeated now. [Eu am eliminat din universul meu eticul şi cred că marea greşeală pe care au făcut-o intelectualii români în timpul fanarioţilor de a nu colabora cu stăpînii nu trebuie repetată acum. (quoted in Tănase 474)]

The Phanariots were 18th-century Greek rulers who rented parts of the Romanian principalities during the Ottoman domination. We can see the complexities of Noica’s approach to cultural politics in this passage, which understands Ceauşescu’s domination as foreign – the latest in the long line of foreign rulers of Romania, a line that goes back through the Ottomans to the Romans whose name is imbedded in the very name Romania. The fact that Noica articulates this position while visiting Paris serves to emphasize the international mode of Noica’s thought, one that obtains whether the topic is the Soviet Union or Ceauşescu. In particular, this internationalism indicates that translation – that inherently international practice – is key to understanding the cultural politics of Eastern Europe. If, as Verdery’s analysis shows, translations can have important domestic political significance, then we can also understand domestic political stances better if we examine translations and their accompanying international, “translative” modes of thought. This article defines Noica’s internationalism through an analysis of his rhetoric of translation from the 1970s and his practice of translation in the 1930s. In particular, I examine his 1973 assertion that Romania is “Europe’s translator” alongside his 1938 translation of Sagittarius Rising, Cecil Day Lewis’s autobiography. Rather than the synchronic “sociology of his fame,” we might better understand Noica’s ideas of Romanian culture by emphasizing diachronic connections between his pre-War and post-War cultural practices. While Noica undoubtedly made his political decisions at least in part on the basis of contemporaneous events, his translations show that his frame for evaluating these decisions was constructed before the Communist period. Translation is key to his intellectual formation before World War Two, and it remains central to his thinking about Romanian language and culture during the Communist period. Translations are the laboratory in which he develops his negative relationship with Europe. A short version of Noica’s biography shows the international life of a man who never did more than travel abroad. Noica is born into a wealthy family in 1909 and dies chasing a mouse in a mountain hermitage in 1987. During his university career, Noica is one of the young stars of his generation, grouped around the charismatic professor and fascist ideologue, Nae Ionescu. Noica publishes several books of philosophy, the first of which wins the Royal Foundation prize in 1934, the same year that the essayist Emil Cioran and playwright Eugen Ionescu win prizes in their fields. In 1936 Noica marries Wendy Mouston, the daughter of an English family living in Romania. Through



Romania as Europe’s translator 

his interactions with this family, Noica learns English very well, and he pursues a series of translations from English literature, including Cecil Day Lewis’s autobiography, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, and H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. With the occupation of Romania by the Soviet army in 1943, Noica’s friends leave for Paris, while Noica stays behind. In 1955, Noica’s wife, son, and daughter also leave. Noica’s closest personal and professional friends will achieve fame as part of the Romanian exile community: Emil Cioran and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade. Not only is Noica left behind by his family and closest friends, but he is targeted by the new Romanian Communist regime. Due to his association with Nae Ionescu, Noica’s allegiance to Romania becomes suspect, and he is first placed under house arrest for ten years, from 1948 to 1958, then imprisoned from 1958 to 1964. After retiring from an academic position in Bucharest, Noica, in 1974, takes up residence in the mountain town of Păltiniş, geographically isolated from Bucharest, though he continues to lobby the government, publish philosophy, and work with students. Because of his profound intellectual training, history of imprisonment, and strong contacts through Cioran and Eliade to the West, Noica was seen as Romania’s best candidate for a dissident, in the Vaclav Havel model. Yet Noica not only fails to act as a dissident, he seems to actively resist the ideas of those in Paris, as in his statement that he had “eliminated ethics” from his world. The Romanian diaspora in Paris was very active, especially after the Czech Charter 77 movement began. For this work, these Romanians suffered both estrangement from their families and home culture as well as attacks from Romanian agents abroad, for example the burning of a Romanian library in Paris or the beating of Radio Free Europe broadcaster Monica Lovinescu. Their work included an unsuccessful fund-raising effort, led by Wendy Mouston, to buy Noica’s release from prison. With so much invested in their work, it is understandable that they should be upset by Noica’s pronouncements while visiting abroad. Sanda Stolojan records hers and others’ reactions to Noica’s 1978 visit: In his Paris meetings, Noica sparkled but did not persuade. Although he was honest, he raised some doubts; he was in a kind of dissonance with the exile community’s interests and political moment. ...Noica gave the impression that recent events (the emergence of dissidents, the Western climate of opinion, the interests of the exile community regarding the regime in Romania) were not as crucial as we thought, caught up at that moment in the fever of resistance and the fight for human rights. Arguments like “in the West you live in precision, but not in truth,” seemed like gratuitous provocations, which, given the urgent need for action, were useless in reality. [În contactele avute la Paris, Noica a strălucit, dar n-a convins. Deşi a fost sincer, a stârnit îndoieli, a fost într-un fel de disonanţă cu preocupările şi cu momentul politic din exil. ...Noica dea impersia că evenimentele din ultima vreme (apariţia disidenţilor, orientarea opiniei în Occident, preocupările exilului faţă de regimul din ţară) n-ar fi fost esenţiale aşa cum le consideram noi, cuprinşi de febra rezistenţei şi lupta pentru drepturile omului în acel moment. Argumente ca

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“aici în Occident sunteţi în exactitate, dar nu sunteţi in adevăr” păreau provocări gratuite care, dată fiind urgenţa acţiunii, erau inoperante faţă de realitate.] (Stolojan 2006: 132)

Stolojan, who would become president of the League for the Protection of Human Rights in Romania, found it difficult to persuade her old friend to take up Western ideas about Romania. Noica pitches his arguments too abstractly, impractically; he seemingly out of touch with the diaspora in Paris. He does not address specific conditions or policies, rather he criticizes the West in broad, moralistic terms and speaks of the possibilities of Romania, even under Ceauşescu. He seems unwilling to engage the diaspora on its terms (such as “ethics”), and he criticizes those who sought to help Romania in general and him in particular. Even today, his actions seem baffling. They are especially baffling in relation to universalizing ideas of truth. They become less baffling, howevers, once we turn to the international dynamics of Noica’s thought, that would approach these questions with the meanings particular to local contexts. The Parisian community would expect Noica to be moved by appeals to justice and human rights, not only because these are sensible positions but also because Noica’s philosophy centers on the same kind of universal terms. As Noica backs away from the diaspora, however, we see his international stance emerge. After his 1978 visit to Paris, he writes to Stolojan, I am a poor philosophic fiddler... who only has one merit: he does not try to join the band of the great, to pretend that he can play in the orchestra. [Sunt un biet scripcar filozofic... care n-are decât un merit: acela de a nu se sfii să intre în taraful celor mari, prefăcându-se că şi el cântă în orchestră”] (Stolojan 2006: 140).

Noica adheres to the “poor” minor role, alienated in Romania, as opposed to joining the “orchestra” of the Western major powers. Stolojan reads this line as a characteristically ambivalent combination of modesty and pride (138). It is also the combination of two understandings of “fiddler.” Stolojan hears (and Noica expects her to hear) a note of frivolousness that makes him unsuitable for the Parisian projects. Yet just five years earlier, Noica had dedicated an essay to “lăutărismul românesc” (Romanian fiddlering), in which he argues for the centrality of “lăutărismul” to Romanian culture and its great promise as a mode of being-in-the-world (Noica 1995). Noica uses a word that means one thing in Paris and another in Romania: in Paris, this “scripcar” is unintelligible, useless; in Romania, he is the country’s best hope. His choice of “scripcar” is itself pointed, as this synonym for “lăutăr” has a Slavic, non-Western, origin. Noica posits himself, in particular his cultural politics, as a translation problem. His untranslatability into the terms of the diaspora is constitutive of his vision of his role in Romania. Noica sees his position as international, and internationalism as the persistence of Romanian specificity, even in the face of the West’s ethical demands, even when “the West” takes the form of his exiled Romanian friends. Noica is a translation problem, and translations are inherently problematic.



Romania as Europe’s translator 

Scholars who have recognized the importance of translation to Noica tend not to give it broad importance. Many scholars of Noica’s work mark a division between the “early” pre-Communist, or sometimes the pre-imprisonment, Noica and the later philosopher of language. Ion Dur argues that Noica’s early period (from 1934) is an “adventure in translation” that ends between 1945–50: As we will show, this is in fact the philosopher’s passage from translation (of great thinkers of the world), somewhat timid ‘exercises’ in philosophy and exegeses, to profound interpretation, and actual creation. [Cum vom constata, însă, aceasta e de fapt trecerea filosofului, de la traduceri (din marii gînditori ai lumii,) ‘exerciţii’ de filosofare şi exegeză oarecum timidă la interpretări de mare profunzime şi creaţie propriu-zisă.] (Dur 1994: 18)

While we might wonder how Noica would respond to this Romanticized description of the later period, we can agree that Noica begins his career with a profound investigation of translation. Dur reminds us of the five major philosophical translations Noica undertakes from 1935 to 1943, including works by Descartes, Augustine, and Kant. Dur’s characterization of this period would be even stronger if he listed the twelve other translations Noica accomplished (with and without the help of his wife, who published four translations independently) from 1934 to 1943. In nine years, Noica translates seventeen books, an intense engagement with the practice. This period of translation is not limited to a period of timid study, especially as the translations show the strong presence of their translator. Rather than making a clean break between preWar translation and post-War creation, we can state that this early period of translation defines the terms of the later periods. Dur himself recovers from his deprecation of this early stage to allow that Noica’s early work “would resonate in the philosopher’s reflections on the Romanian spirit, in his metaphysics of our ethnicity” [“avea să răzbată în reflecţiile filosofului asupra spiritualităţii româneşti, în metafizica făcută etniei nostre” (Dur 1994: 21)]. Translation remains important for Noica in the decades under Communism, to the same degree that his pre-War “passion for Romania” remains with him. In fact, this passion cannot be understood aside from the framework of translation. When we study Noica’s thought, we detect the underground currents of a passion for translation. This current must be called “underground” for two reasons: first, Noica concentrates his writings on the utility of the Romanian language for metaphysics, that is, on topics tangential to the practice of translation. Second, Noica’s comments on translation demonstrate a deep ambivalence, which lasts until the end of his life. Characteristically for Noica, it is the depth of this ambivalence that reveals the importance of this topic. Almost immediately after his release from prison in 1964, Noica begins to edit and arrange publication of many important philosophical translations, including, eventually, the Romanian version of Heidegger’s Being and Time, with a print run of 40,000 copies. While Verdery accurately describes the Păltinişeni’s goals for these translations, Noica’s own goals remain unclear. He does not see them as useful to

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Romanian high culture. In a journal entry, sometime between 1978 and 1987, Noica tells of a “whining young man” who comes to see him, with a trivial metaphysical crisis, fed by some reading in the translations my generation and the following suffered through making (he knows no foreign language) and he wants to do philosophy – how? [are o minoră criză metafizică, alimentată de cîteva lecturi, din traducerile pe care s-a îndurat să le facă generaţia mea şi cea următoare (altminteri nu cunoaşte nicio limbă străină) şi vrea să filozofeze – cum?”] (Noica 1991: 390)

His translations have awakened the desire in this man for the highest practice of the mind, yet his desire is also short-circuited by his ignorance of foreign languages, which Noica considers essential to professional philosophical work. Noica believes the translations lack something essential. In another entry, in 1979, Noica argues for the benefit of translations, but for the translator, not the public that reads them:

Translations. For scientific prose, literary criticism, and prose, they are enough. For poetry and philosophy, they are not. The lack of culture that translations have brought to us, avoiding languages and the study of other cultures... I myself have translated and fought, against others, for translations. But as exercises in themselves and in the language, not to satisfy higher cultural needs. Forced to learn other languages, as we were, we benefited and brought benefit to our culture. [Traducerile. Pentru proză ştiinţifică, critică şi proză sînt suficiente. Pentru poezie şi filozofie, nu. Incultura pe care au adus-o la noi traducerile, scutind de limbi şi de investigaţia altor culturi... Am tradus eu însumi şi militat, contra altora, pentru traduceri. Dar pentru exerciţiu în sine şi pentru limbă, nu pentru satisfacerea nevoilor culturale mai înalte. Siliţi să învăţăm alte limbi, cum eram, am fost în cîştig şi am adus un cîştig culturii noastre.] (Noica 1991: 257)

Neither of these passages presents translations themselves in a favorable light; in fact, they work to encourage the young man’s “minor crisis” while frustrating its resolution. Rather, the practice of translation benefits those Romanians who translate, because it functions as a form of research into other cultures and as a language practice. As he tells his Păltiniş student, Gabriel Liiceanu, who is struggling with a translation from Heidegger, “hermeneutica începe o dată cu actul traducerii” (hermeneutics begins at the same time as the act of translation): the act of translation, that is, not reading a translation (Liiceanu 1998: 69). Thus, if translation has a benefit, it benefits the translator alone. Its effects on the translation’s audience are either dubious or, at best, outside the philosopher’s consideration.



Romania as Europe’s translator 

Noica’s antagonistic understanding of translation gives his rhetoric of translation a more aggressive tone. The best example of this rhetoric comes in an essay written toward the end of 1973, “Memo to the One Above.” Here, Noica argues for the creation of a Romanian institute for the study of Asia that would create a dialog between West and East, a dialog that Europe, he says, cannot create on its own. He comes to the creation of this institute as the practical incarnation of his vision of Romanian culture. He argues first in a series of negatives: Romania is a country without original, particular contributions (with only synthetic contributions) to the culture of the world, a country that suffers from the poly-disciplinarity of its intellectuals (given equally to brilliant synthesis and dilettantish improvisation), a country whose best feature is an adaptable, expressive language. He then turns his emphasis to the capacity of Romania, the potential it has of acting in a unique way, even if the content of that action is determined from outside the country. Noica’s institute is meant to transform these short-comings into advantages. The ability of Romanian intellectuals to master multiple disciplines would allow them to master and embody multiple cultures – histories, intellectual achievements – those of the West and the East. The country’s history of creating cultural syntheses would allow it to synthesize West and East. Lastly, the adaptable language provides Romanians with the words “care ne pun în masură să traducem orice din orice limbă” (which give us the ability to translate anything from any language) (Noica 1995: 4). Noica emphasizes that this institute, like Romania itself, is suited above all for the translation of East to West. He makes this point internationally, through a quotation from German: The German writer we mentioned, Paul Philippi, wonders in that article: is it not “the inherited fate of Romania, as the result of a collective experience of a crisis zone, to be Europe’s translator?” (Noica 1995: 50) [Scriitorul german de care aminteam, Paul Philippi, se întreaba în acel articol: nu cumva este “das ererbte Geschickt Rumaniens, durch eine kollektive Existenzerfarhrung in einer Krisezone, Dolmetscher Europas zu sein?”]

Through this German mouthpiece, Noica links translation to Romanian history. Noica is attracted to an idea that would transvalue the small size of the country and its relative obscurity in European high culture, that is, its lack of cultural capital in comparison with the surrounding, largely antagonistic empires of Austro-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans – the “Krisezone.” Romania has a positive role when envisioned as a translator, optimized, not victimized, by its geographical and cultural position. Noica’s positive characteristics for Romania as a translator match those he sees for the literal practice of translation: the exercise of language, the hermeneutic ability. Indeed, his argument for Romania as “Europe’s translator” is barely metaphorical, strongly linked as it is to the practice of translation. Read against his statements on translation, however, Romania’s positive role as translator places Europe in a negative role as audience. If Noica argues against benefit of translation for its audience, then we can understand that Romania will not serve as Europe’s translator for the West’s benefit.

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Sean Cotter

In fact, the reliance on translations is a reason to criticize the reader, as Noica does with the young man who wants to study philosophy. By positioning Europe as the audience of Romania’s translations, Noica is not offering to help Europe. On the contrary. Noica is setting up the West for criticism, precisely through the translations Romania will offer. This structure of translation-as-critique is not new to Noica in 1973, nor is it simply a rhetorical stance. Noica practices translation-as-critique in his 1930s translations. Nowhere are Noica’s pre-Communist and Communist period ideas of Romanian culture more clearly linked than in his translations. Far from juvenilia, his early translations illuminate his later positions. In these translations, Noica develops his style of engagement through negation, in particular, his engagement with Europe through his arguments against it. Noica demonstrates translation to be a struggle with the original text and originating culture. Noica does not show very much interest in the specifically literary qualities of the originals, and his condescension extends also to the moral qualities of the originals. If he does not demonstrate an engagement with the works as literature, he does seem highly engaged by their presentation of possible ways of being in the world. The most important translation of this period is Cecil Day Lewis’s memoir of his time in the Royal Air Force during World War One, Sagittarius Rising. The book was published by Fundaţia pentru literatură şi artă ‘Regele Carol II’ (the King Carol II Foundation for Literature and Art), the same foundation that gave its award for Noica’s first book of philosophy. It is the first of three books on aviation Constantin and Wendy would translate. (Evidently satisfied by his performance, the Foundation would simply send books, without a letter or contract, and await the Romanian versions.) Noica puts more effort into this text, researching the military and aviation terms which abound in the memoir, listing two Romanian military offices as sources. Only this text gives Noica the chance for a preface on the future of international relations and the role of the producer of culture, in war and peace. Yet Noica’s interest is selective. Even though the preface recognizes that Lewis, poet laureate of England, is “niţel un poet” (something of a poet), Noica does not pay much attention to the traditionally “literary” features of the text. Character voices sound very much alike and place names are left in English while dialects are simply rewritten in stock speech for country Romanians. Metaphors are handled technically; the images and comparisons are baldly restated in Romanian, without attention to aesthetic effect. Noica pays no attention to the title pun, which refers to both the celestial arc of the changing zodiac sign and the ascent of Lewis’s airplane, a valence which Noica’s version ignores: În zodia Săgetătorului (Under the Sign of Sagittarius). In a scene describing an officer’s party, a high drunk complete with soda-water fights, Lewis marks a moment of sudden tension with a play on words: “Rinse me! Rinse me! You silly bastard, you!” “Who’s a silly bastard?” said the Major, fixing the company with a watery eye. A lull. No one, apparently, had told the Major he was an illegitimate idiot. (Lewis 2006: 88)



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Noica simply repeats the same Romanian word for both “bastard” and “idiot,” ignoring the second English meaning of illegitimate: –  Clăteşte-ma! Clăteşte-ma! Tâmpitule! – Cine-i tâmpit? întrebă maiorul, fixând cu ochi umezi adunarea – Tăcere. Nimeni, se pare, nu spusese maiorului c-a e un tâmpit. (Noica 1938: 103). [–  Rinse me! Rinse me! You idiot! – Who’s an idiot? asked the Major, fixing the group with watery eyes – Silence. No one, it seemed, had told the Major he was an idiot.]

There are very few moments in which one might suspect that Noica does not understand the original, especially since his preface to this translation specifies the involvement of his wife, a native speaker. It seems instead that he engaged more seriously with other aspects of the text in translation. While Lewis’s book uses puns to important effect, Noica’s book does not. This difference points toward the perspective Noica takes in his translation. Noica is interested by the central argument of Lewis’s book: the War created a new kind of world, and at the same time, a new kind of person, exemplified by Lewis and his generation. Lewis’s book is a first-person account of his early flying years, beginning with his under-age entry into the Royal Air Force at 17, continuing through his wartime stations at the front and in the defense London, and ending with the two years he spent in China, after the war, as a flying instructor. The book excels in presenting the intellectual and emotional life of a young pilot in a young profession. Descriptions of his duties as a pilot are interspersed with political and sociological reflection. The most powerful sequences are of two kinds: those describing the experience of flight, alone in the air, and those describing the views of modern society suggested by his experience of war. These are often connected for, as he states, “the Western Front was my University,” which taught him an attitude through the experience of altitude. “We [pilots] were daily spectators, creatures of another element, lending ourselves to things beneath us, and the actual physical aspect of this relation educed in me ...an attitude to life itself ” (Lewis 94). He demonstrates the functioning of this attitude, in war and afterwards, through a series of comparisons: The war below us was a spectacle. We aided and abetted it, admiring the tenacity of men who fought in verminous filth to take the next trench thirty yards away. But such objectives could not thrill us, who, when we raised our eyes, could see objective after objective receding, fifty, sixty, seventy miles beyond. Indeed, the fearful thing about the war became its horrible futility, the mountainous waste of life and wealth to stake a mile or two of earth. There was so much beyond. (Lewis 2006: 93)

This passage characteristically segues into a reflection on society: The mentality of the post-war years was no different from that of the war itself – an obsession to take the next objective, whether you wanted it or not, whether

 Sean Cotter

you were any better off when you got it or not, whether you had any idea of where to go next or not. It gave men the illusion they were getting somewhere, doing something, when in reality, they were floundering deeper and deeper into chaos. Civilization, I vaguely realized then – and subsequent observation has confirmed the view – could not progress that way. It must have a greater guiding principle to survive. (Lewis 2006: 94)

And the section ends with an especially significant verb, tucked into the middle of a sentence: We needed effort, not greater in quantity, but other in quality; a different point of view, a new perspective, a more constant aim, co-ordinating and co-relating circumstances and conditions for the general good. Men with such faculties existed; but they were scarcely listened to, for the conditions under which they would undertake to pilot us to safety demanded heavy sacrifice and drastic change – both utterly abhorrent to those who could not see the danger they were in. (Lewis 2006: 95, italics mine).

This passage spells out the double meaning everywhere apparent in the text: the leadership ability gained from aerial perspective, society’s need for “pilots.” The appropriate verb for post-war leadership is “to pilot,” because only those educated by the experience of altitude could understand the greater principles that society needs. Lewis’s memoir is concerned to demonstrate the broader importance of the vantage point he obtained in the war. The pun on “pilot” is a concrete example of the text’s typical procedure. The force of Lewis’s conviction is made palatable by the literary device, which makes the statement gently self-ironic, indirect, and self-effacing. As we might expect, Noica does not reproduce this pun, people refering to such as those “să ne călăuzească” (to guide us) (Noica 1938: 110). Noica is not interested in the rhetoric as much as the audacity of a writer who calls for pilots to lead the world, while coughing and pointing to himself. Noica targets this (literal and metaphorical) haughtiness for critique. Noica’s translation of this passage strips away much of the metaphoric use of military language and increases the sense of distance between the pilot and the ground. One change in particular amplifies the note of condescension in the voice of the translation: La toate acestea noi eram spectatori zilnici, fiinţe ale altui element, dărindu-ne unor lucruri mai prejos de noi; şi, de fapt, tocmai natura acestor raporturi îmi trezi ...o atitudine în vieaţă. (Noica 1938: 109) [To all of this we were daily spectators, beings of another element, giving of ourselves to things lower than us; and, in fact, precisely the nature of these relationships awoke in me ...an attitude in life.]

“Mai prejos de noi” (lower than us) does not have the gentle irony of Lewis’s “beneath us.” Beyond its bare etymology (mai jos = lower), the added preposition (“prejos”) indicates an evaluation; the pilots in Noica’s version give of themselves to things (can we



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call them people?) that are clearly less worthy than them. While Lewis’s phrase might suggest a certain condescension on the pilot’s part, a double meaning that gently ironizes his attitude, Noica’s choice is clear. He removes any self-awareness in Lewis’s voice, leaving him to baldly call those on the ground “inferior.” As the translation continues, the literal and moral distance between sky and ground increases. Lewis’s description of the “mile or two” fought for by the infantry becomes, in Noica, “un petic de pământ. Era atât de mult dincolo de asta!” (a scrap of earth. There was so much beyond this!) (Noica 1938: 108). Lewis’s mile has shrunk considerably, to a scrap, while the emphasis of Noica’s exclamation point increases the amount beyond. The pilot in Noica’s version flies at a higher altitude. A similarly greater moral distance informs his version of the post-war years: Mentalitate anilor de după războiu nu fu deosebită de cea din timpul războiului; – obsesia de a pune mâna pe obiectul cel mai apropiat, fie că-ţi trebuia sau nu, fie că-ţi mergea mai bine dacă-l posedai sau nu, chiar dacă,stiai sau nu încotro aveai să te mai îndrepţi după aceea. Obsesia aceasta dădea oamenilor iluzia că ajungeau undeva, că înfăptuiau ceva, când de fapt ei nu făceau decât să se confunde din ce în ce mai jos, în haos. Civilizaţia, m’am gândit eu atunci, în chip nedesluşit – iar observaţiunile ulterioare mi-au adeverit părerea – nu putea propăşi în chipul acesta. Ii trebuia un principiu călăuzitor. [sic] ceva mai serios, ca să poată supravieţui. (Noica 1938: 109–110) [The mentality of the years after the war was not different from that of the time of the war; – the obsession of putting your hand on the closest object, whether you needed it or not, whether things went better for you if you had it or not, even if you knew or not where you had to head after that. This obsession gave people the illusion that they were getting somewhere, that they were establishing something, when in fact they did nothing other than sink lower and lower, into chaos. Civilization, I thought then, unclearly – but later observations proved my opinion – could not move forward in this way. It needed a guiding principle, something more serious, to be able to survive.]

Lewis’s version uses “to take the next objective” in a military sense, suggesting that after the war some people brought a mercenary attitude to their lives. Noica changes “the objective” to “obiectul” (the object). Rather than implying any military plan, therefore, he describes the people as though they were children, “putting your hand on the closest object.” Mercenaries are at least adults; to compare people to children is more insulting. This change abandons the infantry/ air force conceit, as though the use of a military term for these people did them too much credit. The pilot has again achieved more altitude, since the infantry has shrunk to the size of infants. Noica makes Lewis compare the heroic flying “I” to an infantile post-war mentality. When Noica, unlike Lewis, repeats the word “obsession” in the first and second sentences, he is underlining this greater moral disparity. The last and loudest note of condescension comes when Noica changes “greater guiding principle” to “un principiu călăuzitor. ceva mai serios”

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Sean Cotter

(a guiding principle, something more serious). This choice carries the tone of “get serious”; it chides the grubbing children, demanding that they grow up. Noica’s interpretation of these lines centers on this connection of a pilot’s altitude and moralistic attitude. His sharpening of the sense of distinction between the pilot and everyone else characterizes his translation of these ideas, wherever they occur in Lewis’s text. Yet, this evidence from the translation does not fit precisely our understanding of Noica. He calls Romania “Europe’s translator,” that is, he sees translation as a relationship, not a moral highground. We would expect Noica, who’s closest friends and former wife are all in Europe, who studied in Europe, and who takes Europe, not the Soviet Union or the Romanian state, as his interlocutor, to display a somewhat more nuanced relationship to his subject. This nuance comes in the preface to his translation, which maintains Noica’s moralism, while displaying some affinity for Lewis. Noica creates a binomial to refer to Lewis’s protagonist, “eroul cugetător” (reasoning hero): Nu cumva eroul cugetător, care rândueşte a de sigur existenţa planetei, nu-şi mai înţelege propria sa existenţă? [Could it be that the reasoning hero, who organizes the existence of the planet so confidently, does not understand his own existence?] (Noica 1938: vi – vii).

Noica wonders whether the author of the autobiography lacks not just self-awareness but, something more important for a philosopher, self-knowledge. In particular, Noica wants to identify a split in the nature of “eroul cugetător”: Ceea ce fae vrednic de interes scrisul său – dar cum va fi arătând vieaţa autorului, acum, după experienţele descrise în carte? şi să fie adevărată spusa lui că lucrurile istorisite nu alcătuesc decât un episod fără continuitate în existenţa sa? – este tocmai faptul acesta, pe care-l pune singur in lumină, că firea sa îl îndemna atât către luptă cât şi către contemplaţie. (Noica 1938: vi) [What makes his writing eternally interesting – but what does the author’s life look like now, after the experiences described in the book? is it true, as he said, that the things recounted do not amount to more than an episode, with no connection to the rest of his existence? – is precisely this fact, which he himself brings to light, that his being leads him both toward battle and contemplation.]

Lewis is interesting to Noica because the two parts of “eroul cugetător” are in tension; the warrior pulls against the thinker. Noica sees a moral tension here, not just the textual tension of a biography that describes both transcendent experiences and murder from the same airplane. Noica is attracted by the efforts Lewis makes to understand his existence, even if Noica believes that, ultimately, the translator understands Lewis better than Lewis himself. The translator competes with Lewis for a more penetrating understanding of the subjects of the book, as much the narrator’s psychology as the sociological ideas. The translator shares with Lewis an interest in these ideas, but he disagrees with Lewis’s conclusions. Noica develops, therefore, a split within his own stance as a translator, an ambivalent affinity for the subject of his criticism. Noica



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performs this split rhetorically. It is difficult not to notice that the passage above abruptly, even ostentatiously, brings up the question of the author’s current life in order to question the accuracy of his statements in the text. Noica interrupts himself to suggest that Lewis would disagree with himself. Like Lewis’s text, Noica’s preface performs its own self-difference. The remarkable conclusion of this performance, however, is to transform the split into a vision of a functioning, self-interrupting world. Lewis takes a pacifist stance, arguing for a universal police force and even a universal language, institutions which would reach over national borders as easily as an airplane flies. Noica sees a contradiction in the fact that Lewis’s pacifist stance is an attitude enabled by his experience of war, and he looks for a way to maintain focus on the split subject. Noica eventually agrees, in his preface, with Lewis’s pacifism, but in a heavily qualified way: Even so, you feel that Lewis is right: the horrors of war must be pushed aside. But, possibly, not in the way his book says, but in the way it teaches you, without wanting to. Not pacifism with an international police and language, but pacifism with the world as it is, – with its England, which the author loves so much, and its China, which he understands so well – a world where human exemplars like Cecil Lewis do not need the war in order to be born and become what they are. [Şi cu toate acestea simţi că Lewis are dreptate: grozăvia războiului trebue înlăturată. Dar, poate, nu aşa cum o spune cartea sa, ci în felul cum te învaţă, fără să vrea, ea. Nu pacifism cu poliţie şi limbă universală; ci pacifism cu o lume aşa cum este ea, – cu Anglia ei, pe care autorul o iubeşte atât de mult, cu China ei, pe care el o înţelege atât de bine – o lume unde exemplare omeneşti ca Cecil Lewis să nu mai aştepte războiul spre a se naşte şi desăvârşi.] (Noica 1938: vii)

This passage, like the previous, interrupts a sentence, albeit more smoothly, for a similar performance. Noica interrupts the sentence in order to describe a single planet “interrupted” by individual nations. Noica argues that the ideal world would not be one of universals, but one which functions with and through interruptions, such as national identities and grammatical asides. Noica’s preface, then, connects his translation to a position on internationalism, just as his “Memo” will do, thirty-five years later. The logic repeats around the questions of translation and internationalism: Noica needs Lewis in order to criticize him, just as the world needs nations in order to interrupt it. Noica repeats the relatively simple dialecticism of translation, which needs the original in order to differ from it, in order, actually, to exist at all. Here we see the internationalism of Noica’s understanding of translation. To paraphrase the preface, translation is a world defined by difference, with its Romania and its England, and it is translation as a metaphor for society that allows the birth of “reasoning heroes” like Lewis and Noica. Translation is a way for Romania to be oriented in the world, in a relationship with but not taken over by stronger nations. This reading of Noica’s pre-Communist translation sheds light on his attitudes toward politics under Communism. His puzzling interactions with the Romanian

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diaspora in Paris resemble his interaction with the British poet laureate. The diaspora appeals to universal ideas of human rights, which to Noica would seem to be intellectual versions of the international police and international language. Noica worked out his positions thirty-five years before his conversations in Paris. He displays, in this translation, an exceptional sensitivity to moral questions, such as pacifism and the assumption of a poet and pilot to address the governance of society. When Noica writes that he is “a poor philosopher,” he takes the position that he believes Lewis should have taken, as a poor poet, or a poor pilot. Lewis’s move to politics has all the substance of a pun for Noica, and there is no equivalent play on words possible for “philosopher.” Lewis is part of the same universalizing West as Stolojan, and Noica finds the particularity of Romania morally more attractive. But not just that: Noica is attracted by the role he discovered while translating Lewis. He is attracted by the idea that his moral criticism is dialectically engaged with the subject of that criticism. In this sense, he engages the West’s ideas of dissidence by disagreeing with its moral outlook, offering competing interpretations of both the narrator and the book’s sociological ideas. We might see Noica as a split subject, a “reasoning hero” – reasoning through moral critique, heroic through his engagement with the heroic posture of the dissident. His friends in the diaspora encountered a translation of the “dissident,” a Romanian translation for Europe. “Europe’s translator” is Noica’s version of a particular dynamic familiar to postcolonial studies, the incompatibility of the universalizing, globalizing drives of Western Europe and the colony’s insistence on its cultural particularity. Noica is not interested primarily in the particularities of Romania, however; he in not nationalist in this sense. We can see in his rhetoric and his translations that he is interested in the incompatibility itself, this international tension of opposing philosophical ideas. This international tension is the problem of translation, and Noica envisions Romania as a nation suited to specialize in incompatibility, tension, and problems. The results of this line of thought resemble terms we know from post-colonialism: the split subject, the threat mimicry poses to the projects of the West, for example, the project of resisting an abusive leader like Ceauşescu. What is odd about the compatibility of Noica’s case with post-colonial interests is the fact that he all but ignores the actual colonizer of Romania, the Soviet Union; in fact he worked out his positions in the 1930s, ten years before he would be put under house arrest. So Noica’s positions are not, strictly speaking, “post-colonial.” Rather, they are characteristic of a small country’s necessary engagement with the terms of major countries, which produces the international perspective inherent in the cultural self-image of a minor nation.



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Works cited Cernat, Paul (2007), Avangarda românească şi complexul periferiei (Bucharest: Cartea Românească). Dur, Ion (1994), Noica – între dandysm şi mitul şcolii (Editura Eminescu). Lewis, Cecil Day (2006), Sagittarius Rising (St. Paul, MN: MBI Publishing). Liiceanu, Gabriel (1998), Jurnalul de la Pătiniş (Bucharest, Romania: Humanitas). Noica, Constantin (1991), Jurnal de idei (Bucharest: Humanitas). –— (1995), Modelul Cantemir în cultura noastră (Bucharest: Editura Athena). Noica, Constantin, trans. (1938), In zodia săgetătorului by Cecil Day Lewis (Bucharest: Fundaţia pentru literatură şi artă “Regele Carol II”). Stolojan, Sanda (2006), Sub semnul depărtării: corespondenţa Constantin Noica – Sanda Stolojan (Bucharest: Humanitas). Tănase, Stelian (2003), Anatomia Mistificării (Bucharest: Humanitas). Verdery, Katherine (1991), National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania (Societies and Culture in East-Central Europe; Berkeley: University of California Press)

Translating India, constructing self Konstantin Bal’mont’s India as image and ideal in Fin-de-siècle Russia Susmita Sundaram

Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, USA This article explores the translation activity of the Russian Silver Age symbolist poet Konstantin Bal’mont. He is unique among his peers in his choice of texts to translate, ranged from the ancient Indian drama which Sakuntala to the first Russian translation of the Mayan Epic Popol Vuh. Bal’mont’s role as translator of the Indian text inspired him to posit the Eastern drama as a solution to the cultural crisis of naturalism and positivism in fin-de-siècle Russian theater. More importantly, Bal’mont adopted and articulated a policy of text selection for translation into Russian that eschewed texts from classical antiquity, which were accepted and privileged by the West, opting instead for texts from “authentic” antiquities, such as India and Egypt. Bal’mont in his role as cultural mediator advocated translating truly ancient texts into Russian in order to delineate a more expanded understanding of the Russian self.

Where are you, o unknown God, o future Rome? – Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, “Future Rome” Under the Himalayas, whose peaks reach Heaven’s splendor, I understood the clarity of the muses amid the valley mists. – Konstantin Bal’mont, “Fire”

One theater premiere stood out among others during the Russian fin-de-siècle: Aleksandr Tairov’s Kamernyi Teatr opened in 1914 with a production of the ancient Indian play Sakuntala, written by the Indian playwright Kalidasa in approximately the Fourth century and translated by the Russian Symbolist Konstantin Bal’mont. The choice of this play gave Tairov the opportunity to distance himself from the realism of

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Stanislavksy’s theater and the overly-stylized aesthetics of Vsevolod Meirkhol’hold. In addition to conveying his protest, Sakuntala served as the ideal vehicle to showcase the young director’s own actor-centered aesthetics. Tairov’s directorial debut would not have been as successful without the efforts of Bal’mont, who as one of the artistic advisors to Tairov, recommended Sakuntala for the Kamernyi’s opening act. Tairov’s choice and treatment of the famous Indian play stood out against the backdrop of the more exotically arranged productions of the Mir Iskusstva group, in its commitment to present the material without the fairly typical orientalizing framework characteristic of European productions of Eastern material. The impetus for Tairov’s “neutral” treatment of the Eastern play owes much to its translator, Bal’mont, whose own choice to translate Sakuntala reflects not only the poet’s long-standing preoccupation with India but also signals a possible “solution” for the state of “crisis” that was felt in fin-de-siècle European and Russian culture. First generation Symbolist and cultural philosopher D. S. Merezhkovskii (1886– 1941) saw this crisis of European culture as a result of its mediocrity, and linked it to the rise of the bourgeoisie, giving it the bizarre term “Chinesification” (kitaizatsiia). The second-generation Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok saw the decline of the humanistic tradition of the European Renaissance into impotent individualism as the prime cause of the decline and concluded that contemporary European culture had lost its “musicality,” resulting in a fatal fragmentation of its culture into disconnected, narrowly defined branches of art and science. The result was a hyper-individualistic and culturally fragmented society. This perceived crisis and its expression in the fin-desiècle mood of despair was perhaps best captured by Merezhkovskii in the travel account of his journey to Greece, entitled “Akropolis”: Thus in the Parthenon, remembering with sadness our trivial lives, I thought: we are no longer capable of creating in accordance with nature. It has been twenty centuries now since we distanced ourselves from nature. We are so foolish! We are so powerless! What are we looking for? Where are we going? ... Our souls have neither heroism nor joy. We are proud of our knowledge and are losing our human image, we are beginning to resemble savages amidst despondent and absurd luxury, amidst the grandiose inventions of contemporary technology; we have become alienated in our deformed giant cities – in the stronghold made of stone and iron, built against the elemental strength of nature... (Merezhkovskii 1991: 24)

Merezhkovsii’s words are one of the best expressions of the prevailing mood of fin-desiècle Russia . He mourns the lack of “heroism” and joy in contemporary European life, where a preoccupation with empirical knowledge and technology had resulted in the loss of man’s connection with nature. In no other field was this feeling of dissatisfaction and despair more acute than in the theater. Writing about the current European and Russian theater, for instance, Bal’mont expressed in characteristic style the notion that the Russian theater offered only rehashed material (krovavo-zhalkoe star’e davno razreshennykh problem) and were



Translating India, constructing self 

unable to provide a harmonious and uplifting experience for the viewers. Elsewhere Bal’mont expressed a longing to escape to earlier historical periods, a retrospectivism that fueled his search for ancient and medieval foreign texts to translate.

Longing for the foreign According to Marina Tsvetaeva, Bal’mont was a Russian poet by accident of birth, but in fact he was a poet belonging to the entire world and perhaps even the universe. A nation was a material phenomenon (natsia v ploti) and Bal’mont, even while speaking of the Himalayas or the Andes, was “captivatingly ethereal.” In her description of Bal’mont, Tsvetaeva wrote that his immense love for Russia notwithstanding, the poet embodied Russia’s longing (toska) for the foreign. “[I]n the Russian fairy tale, Bal’mont is not Tsarevich Ivan, but the foreign guest who showers the Tsar’s daughter with all the treasures of the seas ...” Speaking of Balmont, she wrote, “[one meant] water, wind, and the sun” (Tsvetaeva 134–35). In a similar vein, the Acmeist poet Osip Mandelshtam felt that “there stood an ocean between [Bal’mont] and Russia” (Mandel’shtam 251). Tsvetaeva and Mandel’shtam rightly pointed to some essential characteristics defining the Russian Symbolist’s poetic persona, namely, a striving towards dialog with other world cultures, a poetic pantheism expressed in a cult of the elements and a desire to transcend material reality. What both perhaps failed to see was that Bal’mont’s “yearning for world culture” – in Mandel’shtam’s formulation, toska po mirovoi kul’ture – was, as he himself saw it, his most archetypal Russian feature, since universality was the hallmark of the Russian national spirit: a Russian became more Russian the more universal he was, as exemplified by Pushkin, a central claim of Dostoevsky in his famous 1880 speech at the dedication of the Pushkin monument in Moscow. Bal’mont was an obsessive traveler, translator and explorer of alien cultures, and his toska extended far and wide around the globe. Perhaps the most interesting feature of Bal’mont’s absorption in the world around him was the range of cultures taken in by his inguisitive gaze. In a Eurocentric world and as a member of a Eurocentric literary movement, he extended his purview to the very peripheries of the globe to cultures hitherto not much examined by Russian poets. Vladimir Markov, whose scholarship has led to the ‘re-discovery’ of Bal’mont, rightly notes that the poet’s “most important contribution to Russian poetry was to widen its bounds. He looked beyond Russia to other Slavic lands, beyond Europe to other continents (and even in Europe he explored such relatively neglected areas as Spain and Scandinavia, rather than the traditional France and Italy). He introduced entire new civilizations into Russian poetry” (Markov 1969, 263). Although he was characterized by colleagues as the quintessential poet, it should be noted that Bal’mont’s work includes many translations of poetry, drama and prose works in addition to his numerous collections of original poetry. He translated into Russian the complete poetic works of Shelley, several poems of William Blake, Edgar

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Allen Poe and Walt Whitman, and some works of the Czech writer Iaroslav Vrkhlitskii, to name but a few. Bal’mont’s translations go well beyond the borders of European literature. He was the first to translate into Russian the medieval Georgian epic of Shota Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, as well as the Mayan epic Popol Vuh, long before anything comparable existed in English, in addition to Bulgarian, Serbian and Lithuanian poetry. As far as Indian texts were concerned, besides Sakuntala, Balmont translated two other plays of Kalidasa and also the masterpiece of Ashvaghosha, The Life of Buddha, along with Vedic hymns. Dramatic works that he translated are also characteristically drawn from various parts of the world. In addition to the aforementioned plays of Kalidasa, Bal’mont translated Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (staged by Tairov), three plays of the Polish writer Juliusz Slowacki, plays of Belgian playwrights, such as Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird and Crommelinck’s Тhe Sculptor of Masks, Calderón’s The Wonder-Working Magician and Life is a Dream, among others. In all, Bal’mont translated from the works of at least 70 writers from different countries. According to Robert Bird, “[H]is influence on Russian verse was augmented by his translations, some of which have retained the status of classics for the Russian reading public” (Bird 55). Along with examining the issues surrounding Bal’mont’s translation of Sakuntala, the current study posits that the Symbolist poet’s vision of himself as a universal poet was modeled on his notion of India as a universal culture that was all-inclusive. Offering himself as the intercultural mediator Russia clearly needed, Bal’mont wrote to his friend and publisher, Mikhail Sabashnikov, in response to the latter’s proposal to publish in translation the classics of world literature (Pamiatniki mirovoi literatury), that Russia was at a critical stage of self-evaluation and inquiry and must not be offered translations of ancient Greek and Roman literature since these cultures could add nothing of value to Russia’s development. Instead, Bal’mont wanted to bring to Russia an awareness of foreign literature in translation that would “expand the Russian ‘I’,” and to introduce to the Russian reading public “new elements that will enrich the Russian soul, will give it new direction, new points of view...Russians would, [upon reading them] open their eyes to perceive more clearly” (BongardLevin 15). Bal’mont also questioned Sabashnikov’s usage of the term “ancient texts” and offered his own: As regards your proposal to translate something from the Ancient writers, I will happily agree to it, but I am not sure I understand exactly what you mean by Ancient. If you mean the Greek and Latin writers, I think I will never work on them for I do not consider them ancient. Instead, I see in them well known, in fact overly so, epigones and dubious talents, who have been part of a European life and whose works have been irrevocably depleted by repetition. They are imitators and repeaters (and it does not matter whether they do it consciously or not) of authentic values such as those of Egypt and India ...All this is doubtless



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much more interesting and worthy of translation than the Greeks and the Romans.” (Bongard-Levin 14)1

Notably, Bal’mont made the choice to stand apart from his Eurocentric milieu and redefine for himself and for Russia the canon to be translated. The current study looks at Bal’mont’s translations of Indian texts – specifically, of Sakuntala – in order to assess its role and impact in the Symbolist poet’s response to the perceived crisis in European and Russian theater. Also discussed is Bal’mont’s contribution to the Russian quest for a national identity between East and West.

The crisis in European drama The issues surrounding Balmont’s translation of Sakuntala are best understood against the backdrop of the search for a New Drama for the future that was at center of focus of the Russian Symbolists. According to Konstantin Rudnistky, “the question of the theater of the future” and the form it would take in the future was the “subject of endless debate and discussion” and “preoccupied the minds of leading thinkers and writers in the period between the two Revolutions of 1905 and 1917” (Rudnistky 9). More specifically, this intense interest in the future of theater sprang from the perception that European theater was in a state of crisis and Russian writers, critics and others threw themselves into this heated debate, “... as if Russia’s historical fate depended on solving the problems of theater” (Rudnitsky 9). The debate that continued for more than a decade was initiated by the self-appointed leader of the symbolists, Valerii Briusov who opposed the “naturalist” aesthetics of the Moscow Art Theater under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky, which operated on what Peter Szondi defines as the “presupposition that art is fundamentally a mimetic discourse” (Szondi xii). Briusov spoke for all Symbolists when he rejected this “truthful” and entirely earthbound drama. Targeting the heart of the problem, Briusov wrote: “Imitating reality is a means in art, and not its end... Contemporary theaters are aiming more and more towards a faithful recreation of life. These theaters are temples for ‘people with weak powers of imagination’.” Issuing the challenge to the theater that “performed to packed houses,” the Moscow Art Theater, Briusov was convinced that, it was on a “false path” of “counterfeiting reality” along with the “entire European theater.” Bal’mont’s own discontent with the naturalism in Russian and European theater was expressed in his characteristically idiosyncratic manner. Citing ancient wisdom that says, “we become what we 1. The Sabashnikovs’ publishing house was established in 1891 and functioned until 1930, when it was renamed. The most famous of their series are: Pamiatniki mirovoi literatury, Zapisi proshlogo, and others. As Andreeva-Bal’mont notes, “The series Pamiatniki mirovoi literatury was conceived as a collection of the best works of world literature in their best Russian translations and included sections such as “Writers from Antiquity,” “Creations of the East,” “Books of the Bible,” etc. (E.A. Andreeva-Bal’mont 542–43)

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see,” the writer expresses concern at the Europeans who do not value the harmonious in the human soul and, therefore, show theater-goers creations characterized by bezobráznost’ (ugly chaos) and bezóbraznost’ (facelessness). Unable to present anything new, theaters recycled “krovavo-zhalkoe star’e” (pitiful old stuff) at the center of which lay problems that had long been resolved and were thus of no relevance to the contemporary viewing public. One outcome of this dissatisfaction with contemporary theater was the large number of original plays written by the Russian Symbolists. In what Michael Green defines as a “heightened awareness of the developments in the West, a self conscious return to the community of European culture,” (Green 14) most of the leading Russian Symbolist writers turned to the West and more particularly to pasts that were part of the Western canon to look for inspirational models to resolve the crisis in Russian theater. This “powerful retrospective spirit,” as Green describes it, is evident in Meierkhol’d’s article of 1911, “Russian Dramatists,” in which he approvingly enumerates the links between Russian dramatists and theatrical traditions of the past: “Viacheslav Ivanov is reviving the ancient Greek orchestra, Blok is following the traditions of the Italian popular comedy, while his Weltanschauung is similar to that of the German Romantics, such as Novalis; Remizov is laying the foundations of a modern mystery based on the mystery plays of the Middle Ages; Kuzmin writes plays in the spirit of Medieval drama and is also “reconstructing” the French comic theater” (Meyerhold 206–07). Along with attacking the Russian byt plays, Russian symbolists were committed to creating a repertoire that would challenge the traditions of nineteenth-century realistic theater. Bal’mont’s only original play, Tri Rastsveta (Three Blossomings, 1907), however, failed to provide the solution Bal’mont was seeking. Having had the misfortune of opening and closing St. Petersburg’s Dionysus Theater, Tri Rastsveta was a rather weak and unsuccessful attempt by Bal’mont’s to realize his future Theater of Youth and Beauty (Teatr Iunosti i Krasoty).2 He then abandoned attempts at writing an original play and turned to foreign dramaturges in search of an ideal play as part of his contribution to the repertoire that would challenge or replace the current one. He too, like his fellow Symbolists looked to the past; he considered and rejected the iconic representatives of the English Renaissance and Spanish Golden Age, Shakespeare and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1685). Also not up to the mark were contemporary European playwrights Henrik Ibsen and Maurice Maeterlinck. His participation in the debate on future drama did not involve theoretical articles as it did for Briusov or Belyi; instead his response was contained in his choice(s) of foreign plays to translate and in his writings on Calderón, Maeterlinck, Ibsen and Kalidasa.3 2. Even though Bal’mont does not explicate the model of this type of theater in a separate essay, his numerous references allow the critic to extrapolate one. 3. Bal’mont gave several speeches in theaters prior to the performance of the plays he translated.



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Shakespeare, about whose genius Vissarion Belinsky had written that something remained of it even in bad prose translations and whom Nikolai Karamzin had highly praised, evoked mixed reactions in Bal’mont. While admiring The Tempest, Anthony and Cleopatra and Macbeth, Bal’mont was repulsed by Hamlet and Othello. In Othello, Shakespeare came across to Bal’mont as “ethically clumsy” and “aesthetically harmful” (chelovecheski-tiazhelovesen i khudozhestvenno-vreden). Othello was, in his opinion, a savagely revolting play (zverinno-otvratitel’nyi) (Bal’mont: 1980, 569–70). Where Shakespeare was lacking artistically in Bal’mont’s opinion, was in revealing all, in choosing “naturalism” over “harmony.” Pedro Calderón de la Barca, whose plays Bal’mont translated, was, in Bal’mont’s evaluation, the most talented poet and playwright the Spanish Golden Age had produced (CL 15). Bal’mont also wrote about the Spanish playwright and the Spanish Renaissance in his essays, singling out Calderón’s masterpiece Life is a Dream (La vida es sueño) for discussion in his essay “Kalderonovskaia drama lichnosti” (Calderón’s Drama of Personality), written in 1904. The essays and commentaries on Calderón coincided with Bal’mont’s “theosophical” phase, characterized by a heightened interest in Helena Blavatsky’s work, from which he would later disassociate himself. Citing Life is a Dream as the highest achievement of Spanish literature, Bal’mont equates its content with the “best creations of ancient Indian Wisdom (CL 15).” 4 In giving shape to his views on drama, Bal’mont invokes his religious Autos, and agrees with Shelley that the Spanish poet had “attempted to fulfil (sic) some of the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by Shakespeare; such as establishing a relationship between drama and religion, and accommodating them to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human passion” (Shelley 518). Furthermore, as Martin Bidney notes, the Buddhist influence in Calderón’s writing presents Bal’mont with a Schopenhauerian challenge. Bal’mont sees the play’s protagonist, Prince Segismundo, as “the type of Humanity as a whole” (Bidney, 46), and so the problem central to the play must be important for everyone – it must be considered a universal problem. This dilemma is one of intensity versus quietism, which results in Segismundo’s transformation from a wrathful, even violent-tempered heir apparent to the Polish throne into a Buddha-like all-renouncing sage. For Bal’mont, who was a worshipper of intensity and a “Neo-Nietzschean” (Bidney 54), the Easterninfluenced second half of the play was very similar to the resignation to fate advocated by Blavatsky.5 Calderón’s drama concludes with Prince Segismundo renouncing all earthly experiences as illusory and dreamlike and reminds Bal’mont of Blavatsky’s position in The 4. He is most likely referring to the Upanishads. 5. Bal’mont quotes a lengthy passage from Blavatsky, to bring out the similarities between the two and discards both Calderón’s Buddhist solution as well as Balavatsky’s theosophical one.

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Voice of Silence (which Bal’mont wrongly characterizes as a typical work of Indian Wisdom, although Blavatsky did borrow heavily from the Upanishads). Bal’mont rejects this solution, for as Bidney notes, accepting this quietism would mean “that the life of the human personality is an illusion and that all Romantic striving, whether Faustian, Promethean, Don Juan-like, or even Eternally Feminine is nothing but a sham to be shunned” (Bidney 49). Bal’mont suggests instead that we accept both darkness and light, pain and pleasure, and by doing so, “[L]et us be like God,” he writes in his conclusion (KDL 41). Essentially rejecting Calderón’s aesthetic resolution of his play, Bal’mont offers his own “Nietzschean solution” to it and is once again poised to search for the ideal drama. Thus, while Bal’mont found many noteworthy aspects in the works of Shakespeare and Calderón, both posed challenges to Bal’mont’s notion of the ideal drama that would be a perfect fit for his Theater of Youth and Beauty. Bal’mont’s perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic rejection of such iconic figures as Calderón and Shakespeare extended to popular contemporary writers such as Ibsen, Hauptmann and Maeterlinck. In a tellingly titled essay on Maeterlinck, “The Mystery of Loneliness and Death: On the Works of Maeterlinck,” Bal’mont characterizes all three – Ibsen, Hauptmann and Maeterlinck – as poets of alienation. Their portrayal of the human condition – or, more specifically, the “European I,” according to Bal’mont – reinforced the lonely and isolated lives of Europeans. Noting that Ibsen was a lonely man despite all his fame, Bal’mont wonders how Ibsen might provide any spiritual guidance to alleviate current problems. What starts out as a commentary on Maeterlinck’s works, soon digresses into Bal’mont’s gloomy reflections on current Western/ European life. He laments that, “[I]t is difficult, almost impossible, for the Human ‘I’, particularly for the European ‘I’ at its current stage of development to feel connected with the Universal Whole (Mirovoe Tseloe)” (TO 52). Furthermore, preoccupied with their individual selves and their petty concerns and problems, Europeans had become blind to the Beauty and Harmony that abounded in the natural world around them. There was a solution, Bal’mont insists at the end, “[I]f we looked with our souls at harmony, we could certainly achieve it in our lives” (TO 52).

Sakuntala in Europe and Russia Bal’mont’s search for the ideal drama ended with his discovery of Kalidasa, the ancient Indian playwright and author of the famous play Sakuntala. First found and translated into English by William Jones in 1789, Sakuntala was widely appreciated in Western Europe. According to Monier Williams, “[I]ts excellence is now recognized in every literary circle throughout the continent of Europe... (quoted in Thapar 222).” Goethe, whom Bal’mont admired as the Universal Genius of all times, responded to the beauty he saw in Sakuntala with a famous and oft-quoted quatrain:



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Wouldst thou the young year’s blossoms and the fruits of its decline, And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed? Wouldst thou the earth and heaven itself in one sole name combine? I name thee, O Sakuntala! and all at once is said. (Thapar 242)

Schlegel noted in Sakuntala’s structure, a “striking resemblance to our romantic drama” (quoted in Thapar 223). Alexander von Humboldt wrote that as a contemporary of Virgil and Horace, Kalidasa’s “[T]enderness in the expression of feeling; and richness of creative fancy,” had rightfully accorded him “his lofty place among the poets of all nations” (quoted in Thapar 223). Russia, too, did not lag far behind Western Europe in bringing Sakuntala to its readers – with one notable difference – most of the Russian translations were done from European translations. The first Russian historian and noted Sentimentalist writer Nikolai Karamzin was the first to translate the first four acts of the play into Russian in 1792.6 Karamzin, who equated Kalidasa to Homer, echoes the opinions of Western European translators of Sakuntala, writing in his introduction that “the creative spirit resided not only in Europe, but belongs to the whole world!” (Karamzin 114). Kalidasa’s young, innocent eponymous heroine, who is later cheated in love (albeit temporarily) no doubt appealed to the Sentimentalist writer, as did her intimate kinship with the flora and fauna around her. Karamzin’s comparison of Kalidasa to Homer placed the former in the Classical tradition usually reserved for works of European origin. Karamzin also quotes Goethe’s quatrain as the final seal of approval for his choice of text. According to Karamzin, translating appropriate texts was an expression of patriotism on behalf of a Russian translator since these translated texts would serve to enlighten the Russian nation. To this end, Karamzin set himself the goal of translating “the Greeks, the Romans, the French, the English and the Italians” (71), and for Shakuntala he decided to construct a European frame of reference to convince his readers of the play’s merits: on the one hand, the frame links Kalidasa’s text with Homer and classical antiquity, while on the other hand it connects to the voice of Goethe, a European. Karamzin is perhaps hopeful of achieving the goal of aligning his readers with the rest of Europe through his Europeanized presentation of his translated text. Thus, Sakuntala’s Russian journey began in a Classical-Sentimental vein. In the long-standing debate among the Russian intelligentsia about Russia’s orientation between the West and the East, Russian writers were also willing to look eastward for texts to translate for their reading public. Interestingly, Karamzin demonstrates a “reverse orientalism” in his approach to the Indian text, i.e, unlike the standard orientalist approach that exoticizes an eastern text, Karamzin de-orientalizes it by first choosing a German translation as his original and describing it in purely European categories. Without taking the Eurasianist Nikolai Trubetskoi’s extreme position that “the entirety of Russia’s eighteenth century was devoted to the trivial demeaning aping 6. Karamzin used the German translation of Georg Forster. The four Acts translated by Karamzin were republished in 1802 and 1818.

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of Europe” (Trubetskoi 60), it could be argued that Karamzin chose to translate Sakuntala because it had received the approbation of Goethe, Schelling, Herder, William Jones, and other prominent Europeans. Russian interest in Sakuntala was revived almost half a century later when a translator, using the generic Perevodchik (translator) as his pseudonym, translated the first four acts of Sakuntala from the French translation done by the French Orientalist A.L. de Chézy. Perevodchik, whose true identity remains unknown, expresses his disappointment at the lack hitherto of a complete Russian translation of the play that was receiving such an overwhelming reception in Western Europe. What vexed him more was the absence of a Russian translation from the Sanskrit original: “What should we Russians do now? Wait till we ourselves master Sanskrit and translate Sakuntala from the original?” (Sakuntala: Indiiskaia drama 105). Perevodchik himself is, much to his consternation, unable to answer his own challenge, since he did not know Sanskrit either. His contribution, however, was in making an informed choice about the Western European translation to use as his original. Rejecting Karamzin’s choice of Foster’s text since he considered it to be inaccurate, he selected de Chézy’s as his “original,” citing critics’ evaluations of the French text as being of superlative quality. Perevodchik, like Karamzin, was aware of European interest in Sakuntala and exhorts his readers to read the responses of Herder, Schlegel and “other great people” but, better yet, “read Sakuntala,” thus letting the Indian text speak for itself. Notably, he targets scholars as well as the general reading public, punning that, “the orientalists were welcome to scold me, but the unoriented readers will thank me” (Sakuntala: Indiiskaia drama 106). Operating on the common root, “orient-,” Perevodchik’s pun is perhaps directed at Russian orientalists who were lagging behind their European counterparts. Several other translations of Sakuntala – clear evidence of the text’s popularity – were published in Russia in the course of the nineteenth century. In 1868 there were at least two complete translations – most likely from European sources – published in St. Petersburg. Interest in the ancient Indian text extended beyond the Russian capital. A look at the list of translations published in the Bibliografiia Indii [Bibliography of India] reveals that 10% of all translations of Indian texts were of Sakuntala from 1792– 1965. It must be mentioned in this discussion that Perevodchik’s challenge was finally met by the Russian linguist Aleksei Putiata, who translated into Russian the entire text of the play in 1879 from a combination of the devnagari and Bengali recensions, following the advice of the German Indologist Carl Cappeller, who suggested that he combine the two recensions to create a new, almost original text that would suit European sensibilities. Putiata’s accompanying introduction is notable for its Hegelian tilt that echoes the “most deliberately European thinker’s” (Halbfass 98) negative characterization of the East: “Osnovnoi printsip mirovozzreniia Indusov, printsip nepodvizhnosti i kosnosti, radikal’no iskliuchaet vsiakuiu ideiu ob istorii, preemstvennosti sobytii” The fundamental principle of the Indians’ world view, the principle of stagnation and inertia, categorically excludes the very idea of history, of the succession of event.



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(Putiata 1). The Russian translator’s choice of Sakuntala was motivated by the fact that it had received praise and acceptance from notable European writers and philosophers, including Goethe, Herder and Schelling. Thus, Putiata continues Karamzin’s Eurocentric approach to the East and to India, which was soon to be challenged and overcome by Bal’mont.

Bal’mont and Sakuntala Bal’mont’s Indophilia, whose early appearance in and lasting influence on his oeuvre have been noted by most Bal’mont scholars, reached its zenith with his acquaintance with Sakuntala in the original through the French Indologist Sylvain Lévi, whom he met during his translation of Ashvaghosha’s Life of the Buddha. Lévi, who wrote the authoritative Le Théâtre Indien (1890), sent Bal’mont a postcard inscribed with Kalidasa’s words to wish him bon voyage. Bal’mont returned from his trip to India with his completed translation in verse of Life of the Buddha ready for publication.7 He then wrote to his publisher, Sabashnikov, that he would like to undertake the translation of the “exemplary Indian drama of Kalidasa...” (Bongard-Levin 20). Bal’mont had idealized India from very early on in his work. The critic Vladimir Markov states that Bal’mont was drawn to India even as early as his first published collection, containing his original poems and translations of the French poet Henri Cazalis, who was also the author of a monograph on India. His visit to India only intensified his interest and resulted in his decision to translate the plays of the greatest Indian poet and dramaturge Kalidasa. He was undoubtedly aware of the reception and earlier European translations of Sakuntala, as is evident in his correspondence with his wife, E.A. Andreeva-Bal’mont, and with his publisher, M. Sabashnikov. What remains unclear is the reason for Bal’mont’s complete silence on the previous Russian translations – both the partial ones by Karamzin and Perevodchik, and the complete version from Sanskrit by Putiata. Bal’mont himself was unable to master Sanskrit sufficiently in such a short time to translate from the original and he most likely used the English translation of A.W. Ryder.8 He went on to translate the other two plays of Kalidasa’s “triptych” as Dobytaia muzhestvom Urvasi (Urvasi Won by Valor) and Maliavika i Agnimitra (Malavika and Agnimitra), which were published by the Sabashnikovs in a separate edition. The poet’s correspondence with M. Sabashnikov reveals Bal’mont’s heightened interest in Indian literature and drama after his visit there in 1913. In his letter dated December 24, 1913, 7. He left on 1st February, 1912 and returned on 30th December 1912. The almost year-long trip took Bal’mont to Sri Lanka, India, South Africa, Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, Tonga, New Guinea and Tasmania. 8. A.W.Ryder. Kalidasa: Translation of Sakuntala and Other Works. London: 1912. (BongardLevin 569)

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Bal’mont wrote to Sabashnikov that he considered Kalidasa’s masterpiece exceptional: “I am re-reading Kalidasa’s Sakuntala, and if I had always liked it previously, now, after a closer encounter with India, I am fascinated by it. I will be truly delighted to render it into Russian” (Bongard-Levin 552). Valerii Briusov placed Kalidasa alongside Shakespeare, Calderón, Cornielle, Ibsen, Wedekind, and the Greek tragic poets in his article, “Realism and Convention on the Stage.” As part of his solution to the crisis of realism and naturalism on the Russian stage, Briusov named these playwrights as ideal for they, in Briusov’s opinion, truly understood and implemented Aristotle’s ideas on ideal theater; namely, they “incarnated in their works primarily action” (Briusov 1981, 179). Briusov saw the same Aristotelian principle even in Maeterlinck’s characters, who, “throughout the course of all the plays remain in almost one and the same posture, the possibility of action keeps growing in their souls to burst forth in the last scene as the catastrophe” (Briusov 1981, 180). Briusov, however, clearly aligns himself with and includes the Russian voice in his usage of the first-person plural pronoun “we” when describing the problems confronting contemporary theater: “[W]e Europeans are predominantly analytical. In this is our strength and herein lies our imperfection. Our life will become harmonious only when we understand that we perceive the universe from a single perspective (odnostoronne) that our understanding of it is complete” (Brodskaia 187). Although seeming to espouse a philosophy of Eastern wholeness, it should be noted here that Briusov’s choice of Kalidasa was not dictated by a heightened interest in the East (or India). The erudite scholar was no doubt aware of the enthusiastic reception – and inclusion – of the Indian classic as part of the Western canon.9 In fact, in an earlier correspondence with Bal’mont, Briusov responded to his colleague’s enthusiastic admiration of ancient Indian philosophy, noting, “[y]ou are mistaken. Indian wisdom does not exist... The Hellenes are more correct than mantras” (Bongard-Levin 8). Bal’mont, as we saw earlier, did not share his colleagues’ evaluations of the other playwrights mentioned by Briusov. He singled out Kalidasa from Briusov’s list and explicated the reasons for his admiration for Kalidasa’s dramaturgy in the speech he gave on the staging of Sakuntala at its one-year anniversary (later published as an article), entitled “Slovo o Kalidase” (About Kalidasa). As Bal’mont had envisioned in his ideal theater of the future, Kalidasa was first and foremost a poet who was also a playwright. In this Bal’mont agreed with Shelley’s idea of the primacy of the poet; in fact he quotes Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry” in his discussion of the ideal theater. Bal’mont also points out that Shelley, who cites the “Athenian tragedies” as the finest example of dramatic art, was not entirely correct in his assessment: “While speaking of the theater, Shelley did not know as almost everybody at the time, about one of the most ideal persons, about Indian theater, or else he would have brought his thought to its 9. Laurence Senelick mistakenly attributes Briusov’s awareness of Kalidasa to the play Vasantasena that had been performed at Suvorin’s Theater in St. Petersburg in 1898. Vasantasena, another play well-known in Western Europe was in fact written by Shudraka.



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most accurate conclusion, and would have placed Kalidasa in first place as the poet-dramaturges of the world.” Only Kalidasa among all of the world’s playwrights had perfected in its most ideal form Shelley’s notion of theater as transformation and ascension, voznesenie (Bal’mont 1980, 571). As Bal’mont saw it, contemporary theater was doomed since it relied on material that clearly lacked Beauty and harmony; absent also was the synthesis of various art forms and the religious spirit. He wrote to his wife Ekaterina Andreeva, “I am greatly enchanted with Sakuntala ... It is a work of complete perfection. I see this drama as a magical combination of sounds, colors, body movements, dance of souls, of delicate dance, of the finest feelings” (Bongard-Levin 552–53). Bal’mont also cites Beethoven and Scriabin as two modern practitioners of synthesis of various art forms; Scriabin, according to Bal’mont, was “not European” but had an “Indian soul.”10 Also significant was the fact that the Indian playwright’s works represented an escape from the vulgar materialism of contemporary theater, a way out of the attention to petty details that was a part of current theatrical practice. The action of Sakuntala takes place at two levels, the literal and the figurative: the protagonists are able to move between earth and heaven, and on a metaphorical level there is a portrayal of the real as well as the ideal. Also, Kalidasa’s three plays, taken chronologically, were seen by Bal’mont as the successive stages of Kalidasa’s evolution. In Maliavika i Agnimitra (Malavika and Agnimitra), the action takes place entirely on earth, in Sakuntala, the play culminates in the coming together of the heavens and earth, and in Dobytaia muzhestvom Urvasi (Urvasi Won by Valor) the two worlds are in constant contact with each other. To Bal’mont, the treatment of the two worlds in Sakuntala “signified the complete blossoming of the poet’s genius,” and in his final play, Kalidasa had demonstrated the “artistic summing up of his thought process that preoccupied Kalidasa all his life” (Bal’mont 1980, 575). Bal’mont, too, had unsuccessfully attempted to have his characters in Tri Rastsveta bridge this world and the one beyond (potustoronnyii mir) and was delighted in finding the appropriate treatment of the world of the Gods in the Indian plays. The poet felt that Sakuntala anticipated much in the Theater of Youth and Beauty and was relieved that it had not been “hijacked” by the naturalists, who had “reduced theater to a miserable clinging to boring, trite materialism” (Bal’mont 1980, 579). The naturalists had not understood that the “path of the soul and of dreams” was richer and more beautiful than the trite reality, byt, and the “lower depths of life” (an allusion to Gor’kii’s play, The Lower Depths), which they insisted on portraying. Interestingly, Bal’mont had no hesitation in offering Kalidasa’s play in his translation to Tairov, considering it was of Indian origin and might have posed both artistic and cultural challenges to the director and the viewing public. Briusov, as well as Bal’mont’s friend the poet Iurgis Baltrushaitis, who were among the artistic advisors to the newly formed Kamernyi Teatr, supported and encouraged Bal’mont’s endeavor and Tairov’s selection 10. Scriabin is one among Bal’mont’s pantheon of “Indian” artists; others include William Blake, Shelley St. Teresa and Aksakov

 Susmita Sundaram

of Sakuntala for its premiere. Tairov, who had distanced himself from the “trite realism” of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, wrote that, “tradition, which jealously guarded the approaches to every other classical work, did not lie in wait for us in this one; and it seemed we could more easily free ourselves from the methods of contemporary theater...” (Tairov 56). Kalidasa’s works were, above all, harmonious “poems of love.” The central theme of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé – love – which Bal’mont singled out for discussion and praise in his introductory talk on Wilde’s play, finds its ideal treatment in Sakuntala. The main reason Kalidasa’s famous play touched both Europeans and Indians, writes Bal’mont in his essay, was that love was victorious in it; characters love till they suffer for it, continue to love through their suffering and emerge victorious lovers at the end. Also, the “Indian magician’s” pantheistic imagery and love of nature made him a natural kindred spirit to the pantheist Bal’mont. The play is named for its eponymous protagonist, Sakuntala, who is the daughter of the heavenly nymph Menaka and the sage Vishwamitra. Abandoned by her parents at birth, she is adopted by the hermit Kanwa, who then raises her in his serene, sylvan hermitage. She comes of age, portrayed by Kalidasa as a beautiful and innocent young woman, whose beauty captivates King Dushyanta when he is on a hunting expedition close to the hermitage. Kanwa and other hermits are away at the time Dushyant is in the hermitage, courting Sakuntala, whom he then marries. He prepares to return to his capital, Hastinapur, and gives his ring to Sakuntala and bids her to join him as soon as her father returns from his journey. Sakuntala is later cursed by the angry sage Durvasa when he finds her lost in her thoughts of her beloved husband and fails to extend the customary hospitality and respect to him. The curse stipulates that Dushyant would forget her and would only recognize her if she showed him a token of remembrance, namely the ring. Sakuntala loses the ring on her way to join King Dushyant, while bathing in a river and thus is shunned by the King when she arrives at his palace. He regains his memory later when a fisherman finds the ring and brings it to the Dushyant. The two lovers are finally united after Dushyant is sent to the heavens after a successful campaign against evil demons. Another aspect of Indian drama that was a perfect answer to Bal’mont’s quest was its nuanced understanding of the role of the spectator in the theatrical process. In order to create the Theater of Youth and Beauty, Bal’mont wrote that the poet-playwright must understand that the spectator’s will was like “malleable metal” from which could be sculpted “lively sculptures” and the “most refined strings.” In ancient Indian drama as well, the main goal of the elaborate preparation on the part of the actors was to evoke an emotional response – rasa – from the spectator, requiring his creative participation. To this end, the ancient Indian dramatic treatise, the Natyashastra, recommends the use of specific colors as backdrops on the stage to evoke the appropriate mood from the audience at various points during the play. Tairov successfully adapted this recommendation by using colors that would be evocative to modern Western audiences.



Translating India, constructing self 

Bal’mont’s translations of Sakuntala and Kalidasa’s other two dramas when published in 1916 were accompanied by an Introductory essay by the well-known Russian Orientalist Sergei Ol’denburg, whose name was specifically suggested by the poet to Sabashnikov. Ol’denburg, who was the permanent secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was also the author of popular articles on Asia and had translated several classical works from both western and eastern literature. The French Indologist Sylvain Leví knew Ol’denburg as did many leading Russian writers, among whom were Gor’kii, Korolenko, Belyi and Blok. Bal’mont was clearly relieved and greatly encouraged when Ol’denburg agreed to provide the introduction to his volume of Kalidasa’s translations. The academic rightly noted Bal’mont’s great service to the Russian reading public in doing these translations. Unlike Briusov, who had by this time fallen out with Bal’mont and was critical of Bal’mont’s translations, Ol’denburg took a more comprehensive approach to the poet-translator. Clearly understanding the challenges of translating from another translation – and not from the original – Ol’denburg expressed gratitude on behalf of the readers to the poet for conveying “foreign images” in “the words and sounds of our native Russian” (Bongard-Levin 565). The nationalist pride in claiming that there were now Russian translations of these Eastern masterpieces overrode perhaps any scholarly objections he might have had. Ol’denburg found Bal’mont’s poetic idiom in his translations akin to Kalidasa’s, whose poetic talent he highly valued. Bal’mont placed Kalidasa above all other poets – including himself – as he explains in this passage, written in the poet’s characteristic style: In India the poet Kalidasa already possessed all the sophistication of an advanced culture, when I was still but a Scythian witnessing the dawn of my country’s history and he would say on seeing me, ‘A flower can only bear the weight of a bee, but not that of a bird.’ And I would understand instantly that in this country of awesome monsters, dizzyingly high peaks, immeasurable wealth, and subtle correspondences, my measure of lightness was in fact, a measure of weightiness.... (Bal’mont: 1980, 574)

Some elements typical of Bal’mont’s discourse are readily discerned in this statement replete with idiosyncratic and pantheistic imagery, namely the retrospectivism that was characteristic of the Silver Age as a whole, and the quest for cultural models to be emulated by a crisis-ridden modern civilization. The latter feature too was typical of the Silver Age, but Bal’mont made a fairly unusual choice of his model culture: India. Not only did Bal’mont choose a culture that was not at the center of attention in the Eurocentric Symbolist movement (an interest in India would come later with Acmeism), but he also idealized it. Bal’mont’s journey into the past features a return to a mythical Russian past that operates on the idea of the Scythians as the pagan ancestors of the Slavs, and of the Russians, in particular, but it also includes a vision of a dialog between pagan Russia’s “Scythian” past and India’s ancient past. This imagined crosscultural dialog is conducted between the Russian poet Bal’mont in his Scythian avatar and the ancient Indian poet-playwright Kalidasa. The Indian poet already possesses

 Susmita Sundaram

sophistication as he lives in a “refined world” (utonchennyi mir) of subtle correspondences at a time when the “Scythian” poet is just beginning his evolution, and yet the two poets can communicate. The Scythian-Russian poet realizes, however, that he has not yet achieved the “measure of lightness,” i.e., the sophistication that the Indian poet already achieved long ago; thus Kalidasa is presented as an Ideal for the modern poet. Bal’mont’s idealizing of India, when seen in the context in which the above- mentioned passage is written, reveals a comparative aspect. More specifically, comparing India with Western Europe, Bal’mont contends that the latter has little to offer when compared to the former. India does not merely embody a past ideal: its contemporary life, in Bal’mont’s view, has kept alive the ethos of Idealism. Providing examples of contemporary European nations, Bal’mont indicates that their cultural status differs greatly when compared to that of contemporary India. Present-day Spain, for example, conjures up for Bal’mont images of “vulgar coolies, resembling bandits,” as well as of unlimited cruelty. Spain’s famous bullfights do not evoke Bal’mont’s enthusiasm either; instead he sees them as a sign of barbarity. Contemporary England does not fare any better: “The first impression of England would be fog, cold silence ... and the disgusting sight of a meat shop” (Bal’mont 1980, 573–74). Contemporary India emerges as a complete contrast to Spain and England: there the poet would see young men with lithe bodies resembling the stems of plants and women who were like fairy tales with eyes that would “reflect the song of silence and lakes of countless lotuses.” In this country of poets and beauty, Bal’mont sees himself as one with the Universal spirit, the one termed Brahma, and accepts the pantheistic belief of the Upanishads that Brahma is manifested in every phenomenon, especially in human speech and poetic hymns, and also, conversely, that every phenomenon is part of Brahma.

Conclusion This article has attempted to demonstrate that revisiting Bal’mont’s oeuvre and examining his role as translator may add new facets to the image we have of him and add complexity to the traditional vision of the “naïve singer” of often enchanting, but also emotionally overblown, poems. This analysis suggests that Bal’mont was in fact quite an original philosopher of culture in the Silver Age; that he was part of the Symbolist “yearning for world culture.” It is true that the arts in Russia, especially music and ballet, even before the Silver Age, had incorporated many oriental motifs (Rimskii-Korsakov, Borodin), but these were largely decorative (and in any case, rarely taken from Indian culture). Bal’mont went beyond the use of oriental motifs for purely decorative effect, studying and translating an “other” that had not attracted much attention from the Symbolists, and he did so for the purpose of learning a cultural lesson. Bal’mont was, of course, above all a highly talented poet of early modernist verse – despite the considerable body of rather poor verse alongside his brilliant poems – but



Translating India, constructing self 

he was also a champion of the concept of world culture and Weltliteratur in the Goethean sense and wanted to see Indian literature added to the literature “of the world.” He created a “cultural mythology” that he based on a variety of ancient and modern cultures, usually cultures deemed inferior to the European tradition. This was unlike the position of the influential German philosopher Hegel, who “disqualified” Indian culture as “stagnant, frozen in the past and incapable of resuscitation.” In Bal’mont’s cultural mythology, this judgment was reversed and India emerges as “eternally young,” as opposed to “stagnant and frozen,” a defense of the East that is at one and the same time a defense of traditional Russian culture. Bal’mont thus sees Russia as a mediator between East and West and himself as an interpreter of the East, a role that would then be extended to rescue and rejuvenate the West. Increasingly favoring India and seeing in it a bulwark against the “dangers” of positivism and naturalism, movements that celebrated the current moment and a notion of “progress” while invalidating the past and privileging a superior future. His cultural mythology also centered on the notion of the universal poet exploring ever new vistas of world culture. Who else if not the Poet could be mediator, catalyst and carrier of cultural synthesis? And as all Russian literati knew since Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech, there was a precedent in Russian history: the most Russian of all Russian poets and also the most universal man, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Undoubtedly Bal’mont saw himself as Pushkin’s successor, and if not his equal in talent, then certainly his equal in the task of universalizing culture. It can be said perhaps that Bal’mont was the more universal of the two poets while remaining equally Russian. While Pushkin in his famous “Exegi monumentum” had invoked “every tribe and tongue” in Russia, Bal’mont’s traveling muse had embraced such far-away places as India, Japan, and Mexico. Bal’mont was likely aware of Gogol’s famous statement about Pushkin being the “Russian man in his ultimate development as he, perhaps, will be in two hundred years” (Gasparov 6). Did Bal’mont see himself as the new Pushkin, who emerged one hundred years later in answer the Gogol’s famous prophecy? He was the Poet who merged art and life, wrote in all genres, explored all cultures, mediated between East and West as a translator and created the myth of synthesizing the European East (Russia) with the Oriental East (India).

Works cited Andreeva-Bal’mont, E.A. 1966. Vospominaniia. Moskva: Izd-vo im. Sabashnikovykh. Bal’mont, K.D. 1909. Belye Zarnitsy: Mysli i vpechatleniia. St.Petersburg: M.V. Pirozhkov –—. 1904. “Chuvstvo lichnosti v poezii.” [=CL] In Gornye Vershiny. 11–25. Moscow: Grif. –—. 1916. Iasen’. Videnie dreva. Moscow: K.F. Nekrasov. –—. 1904. “Kal’deronovskaia drama lichnosti” [=KDL] In Gornye Vershiny. 26–42. Moscow: Grif, –—. 1980. “Slovo o Kalidase.” In K.Bal’mont. Izbrannoe. Stikhotvoreniia. Perevody. Stat’i, edited by L.Ozerov, 568–580. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura.

 Susmita Sundaram –—. 1908. “Taina odinochestva i smerti: O tvorchestve Meterlinka.” In Belye Zarnitsy: Mysli i vpechatleniia, 143–61. St.Petersburg: Izdanie M.V.Pirozhkovoi. –—. 1907. Tri Rastsveta. Moscow: M.V. Pirozhkov. –—. 1895. V bezbrezhnostii. Moscow: A. A.Levinson. –—. 1903. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v perevode K.D. Bal’monta. 3 vols. St.Petersburg: Izdanie Tovarishchestva ‘Znanie’. –—, trans. 1990. Ashvaghosha Zhizn’ Buddy. Kalidasa Dramy, edited by G.Bongard-Levin Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia litaretura Bibliografiia Indii. 1965. Moscow: Nauka Bidney, Martin. 1998. “Life Is a Dream and the Challenge of ‘Saint Buddha’: Bal’mont’s Calderonian Crisis and Its Nietzschean Resolution.” Slavic and East European Journal 42.1: 37–57 Bird, Robert. 2004. “Konstantin Dmitrievich Bal’mont.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 295: Russian Writers of the Silver Age, 1890–1925, edited by Judith E. Kalb and J. Alexander Ogden with the collaboration of I.G. Vishnevetsky, 54–62. Detroit: Gale. Blavatsky, H. 1976. The Voice of Silence, Pasadena CA: Theosophical University Press. Bongard-Levin, G. 1990. K.D. Bal’mont. Ashavagkhosha. Zhizn’ Buddy. Kalidasa. Dramy, 6–28. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Brodskaya, G. Iu. 1976. “Bruisov i Teatr.” In Literaturnoe Nasledstvo. Valerii Bruisov, 167–179. Moscow: Nauka. Briusov, Valerii. 2001. “Against Naturalism in the Theater.” In Theater of the Avant-Garde. 1890– 1950, edited by Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf, 72–77. New Haven: Yale UP. –—. 1981. “Realism and Convention on the Stage.” In Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists: An Anthology, edited and trans. by Laurence Senelick, 171–82. Austin: UTP. Gasparov, B, Robert P. Hughes, Irina Paperno, eds. 1992. Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Green, Michael. 1986. The Russian Symbolist Theatre: An Anthology of Plays and Critical Texts. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Kupriianovskii, P. V. and N. A.Molchanova. 2001. Poet Konstantin Bal’mont: biografiia, tvorchestvo, sud’ba. Ivanovo: Izdatel’stvo Ivanovo. Levi, Sylvain. 1978. The Theatre of India. Volume I. Trans. Narayan Mukerji. Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Mandel’shtam, Aleksandr. 1996. Serebriannyi vek: Russkie sud’by. St.Petersburg: Predprinimatel’. Mandel’shtam, O.E. 1991. The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Edited by Jane Gary Harris. Trans. by Jane Gary Harris and Contance Link. London: Collins Harvill. Markov, Vladimir. 1969. “Bal’mont: A Reappraisal” Slavic Review: American Quarterly of Soviet and East European Studies 28: 221–264. –—. 1988. Kommentar Zu Den Dichtungen von K.D. Balmont, 1890–1909, Köln: Böhlau. –—. 1992. Kommentar Zu Den Dichtungen von K.D. Balmont, 1910–1917, Köln: Böhlau. Merezhkovskii, D.S. 1911. “Sputniki.” In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XII. St. Petersburg: Izdanie T-va M.O. Vol’f. –—. 1991. “Akropol’.” In Izbrannye literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Knizhnaia palata. Ol’denburg, S. F. 1916. Introduction. In Kalidasa Dramy, edited by S. F. Ol’denburg, v-xxiv. Moscow: Izdanie M. and S. Sabashnikovykh. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. 1981. “Russian Dramatists.” In Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, edited by Laurence Senelick. Austin: University of Texas. Putiata, Aleksei. 1879. “Sakuntala: Indiiskaia drama Kalidasy.” In Russkii Vestnik 142: 1–48.



Translating India, constructing self  Rudnitsky, Konstantin. 1988. Russian and Soviet Theatre: Traditions and the Avant-garde, edited by Lesley Milne, trans. Roxane Permar. London: Thames and Hudson. “Sakuntala, indiiskaia drama deistviia 1,2,3,4.” 1838. Syn Otechestva 3: 105–160. Shelley, Percy. 2002. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Edited and selected by D. Reiman, and N. Fraistat. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company. Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of the Modern Drama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tairov, A. 1969. Notes of a Director, trans.William Kuhkle. Coral Gables FL: University of Miami Press. Thapar, R. 1999. Sakuntala.Texts, Readings, Histories. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Trubetskoi, N.S. 1991. The Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russia’s Identity. Edited and trans. by A. Liberman. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications. Tsvetaeva, Marina. 1969. Proza. Lichtworth: Bradda Books.

The water of life Resuscitating Russian avant-garde authors in Croatian and Serbian translations Sibelan Forrester

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA This article examines the practice and significance of several Croatian and Serbian translations of poetry from Russian in the 1970s and 1980s. It takes examples from versions of three Russian writers from the early 20th century made by translators primarily known for their original writing, Josip Sever, Danilo Kiš, Irena Vrkljan and Dubravka Ugrešić. Each translator selects a suitable literary forebear or model and mobilizes the original author’s image and significance, along with the status of Russian literature and culture in general, in order to shape his or her own bibliography and literary personality. These translations play multiple roles in the recipient culture: they select particular Russian authors and make them available in the local language, thus recommending them to readers, while the acts of selection and translation demonstrate the Russian authors’ influence on or connections with the local writers who choose to translate them.

Introduction The position of Russian language and culture in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s had many facets.1 There was a long underlying tradition of cultural and linguistic connection between Russia and other Slavic nations and influences that moved in both directions at different times. For some decades, beginning in the late 18th century, Serbian literary culture took place in “Slavo-Serbian,” a language based largely on Russian and 1. Thanks to David J. Birnbaum, Wayles Browne, and Marina Rojavin for comments and suggestions, to Josip Užarević for generous help obtaining materials and a constant scholarly example, to Gerry Smith for insights into the current Russian poetry scene, and to Brian Baer for helpful editorial interventions. I have not examined translations from Slovene or Macedonian because I do not know those languages, but I hope that the examples of Serbian and Croatian prove indicative.

 Sibelan Forrester

Church Slavic. After the First World War, the new state of Yugoslavia (especially the traditionally Orthodox regions of Serbia and Montenegro) welcomed many Russian émigrés and refugees after the 1917 revolution, and the capital, Belgrade, became a regional center of Russian émigré life and culture. After the Second World War, existing historical and linguistic connections were bolstered by the lively intellectual and political discourse, both spontaneous and cultivated, among fellow socialist countries. Moreover, each phase of Russian influence continued into later historical periods: Danilo Kiš gratefully mentions the broadly-educated and capable Russian émigrés, former White Army officers, who taught at his high school in Montenegro rather than leaving the new socialist Yugoslavia after WWII.2 Despite Tito’s famous break with Stalin in 1948, Russian was not summarily dropped from school curricula; teachers and textbooks remained in place. Yugoslavs who attended provincial secondary schools that offered only one modern foreign language were especially likely to arrive at university with Russian. (Knowledge of Russian among students from the Yugoslav provinces forms an interesting parallel with the Russian futurists, whose provincial origins, were noted by Vladimir Markov (Markov 1968: 14.) The way students applied to universities in Yugoslavia strongly encouraged any who enrolled to study literature to continue working in language(s) they already knew, and so language education policy in any one decade had long-lasting consequences.3 Many Yugoslavs saw their country as a cultural mediator, perhaps by analogy to its role in the non-aligned political movement, distinct from the USSR and Soviet bloc nations but also unlike Western Europe. Dušan Makavejev’s 1971 film WR: Misterije organizma [WR: Mysteries of the Organism] intercuts the main action and Yugoslav characters with clips from Stalinist propaganda films and scenes of anomie and odd behavior set in a western metropolis, and clichés of various European national types, Symbolizing East and West, play humorously in Dubravka Ugrešić’s 1988 novel Forsiranje romana reke [Fording the Stream of Consciousness], as Yugoslav writer Pipo Fink remains frustrated in the middle.4 By the 1980s, the sense that Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs themselves offered a viable alternative or middle way began to seem questionable in the face of rampant inflation and societal malaise. A Yugoslav would be the butt of jokes involving an American and a (Soviet) Russian, as humor revealed the disappointed underlying idea that the “third way” could complicate and improve on Cold War binary oppositions. Even here, Russia (the USSR) continued to structure Yugoslavia’s position between socialist East and capitalist West, setting off the Yugoslav situation by contrast. 2. See note 19. 3. Students in then-Yugoslavia, like many in Europe, applied, were admitted, and matriculated directly into the department of study, so the only way to begin studying a new language as part of one’s major subject was to enroll in a program such as comparative literature – as, indeed, did two of the translators examined here. 4. Dubravka Ugrešić, Fording the Stream of Consciousness, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993).



The water of life 

In the 1970s and especially the 1980s, however, the Soviet Union had the general reputation in Yugoslavia of a locus of low-status stagnant socialism, opposed and outdone by the political and economic freedoms and more appealing popular culture of Western Europe and especially North America. The end of the Khrushchev-era Thaw and the Warsaw Pact’s incursion into Czechoslovakia in 1968 dispelled any lingering sense that the USSR could offer political or cultural inspiration. Official Soviet literature appeared as stunted as the economy, redeemed only by a lively economic black market and a dissident literary underground. Though the official Soviet school of Socialist Realism played a role in post-WWII Yugoslav letters, authors were not obliged to adhere to it, and most of the better ones did not. A shift in the status of Russian literature is clear in data on publication of translations, as in this example, based on Croatian translations. The table breaks the aggregate data between 1969 and 1970 to reflect the aftermath of 1968 and also lists the average number of translations per year for each time segment: Books of literary translation (~average per year) published in Croatia:5 from English: all genres poetry from French: all genres poetry from German: all genres poetry from Italian: all genres poetry from Russian: all genres poetry

1945–1969

1970–1985

628 (~25)   15 (~0.6)

527 (~33)   11 (~0.7)

421 (~17)   11 (~0.44)

209 (~13)   14 (~0.9)

311 (~12.5)   15 (~0.6)

188 (~11.75)   11 (~0.7)

111 (~4.5)   23 (~.92)

  77 (~4.8)   11 (~.94)

451 (~18)   32 (~1.25)

  58 (~3.6)    7 (~0.44)

5. Data taken from Dragojević and Cacan (1988), whose format makes it easy to break the data down by year. Books listed include both anthologies and works by individual authors. While information on translations published at the time in Serbia or Bosnia/Hercegovina, not to mention Slovenia or Macedonia, might show different patterns – the strong showing of Italian poetry, for example, could well be more typical of Croatia than of Serbia or other republics – the drastic change in translation from Russian is typical. Data for translations from English include authors from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Data for translations from German include authors from Austria and Germany (not Switzerland; this may lead to some underreporting).

 Sibelan Forrester

These figures suggest several trends: a significant increase in translation from English, a less significant decrease in translation from French and German, as Italian holds steady (with an especially strong presence in poetry translations). The most evident and striking fact, however, is the huge drop in translations from Russian. In particular, whereas 1945–1969 saw more translations of poetry from Russian than from any other language listed, in 1970–1985 Russian poetry translations fell to last place. It is true that the authors translated were often classics rather than recent or contemporary authors – among poets, Shakespeare, Dante and Pushkin put in strong showings – but even pre-Soviet Russian literature lost most of its share of the literary market, perhaps with a parallel dip in reputation. Translators from Russian in the latter period were fighting an uphill battle and must have felt more of a personal investment in their task, rather than purely economic motivation. At the same time, Russian literature in the 1970s and 1980s offered considerable treasures to readers. Like the Soviet intelligentsia or Russians abroad, Russian-speaking Yugoslavs were discovering and re-discovering Silver Age authors and texts repressed under Stalin (Osip Mandel’shtam, Marina Cvetaeva), authors who had recently emigrated (Joseph Brodsky), or underground Soviet writers whose work spread through samizdat. For a Yugoslav reader, such works offered the pleasure of being “in the know” about writers who were not yet canonical, the wonderful quality and high seriousness of much of this writing, and perhaps some of the reflected glory of a martyred poet’s role as culture hero. The translator could enjoy the special possibility of restoring justice to unduly neglected authors. Any translation enriches the recipient culture and recommends the authors rendered, but here the writer-translator also played the role of rescuer and resuscitator of prematurely “dead” writers, supplying the loving attention that the original culture had not offered them. The publication figures above also suggest that by the early 1980s a Yugoslav translator of Russian poetry may have felt wise, pure, erudite, or cussed enough to withstand the more popular or commercial values of Western literature, and to carry on a different kind of literary commerce. In sum, even as the market for translations from Russian shrank, making and publishing such translations still offered definite rewards. I concentrate here on translations of three authors: Vladimir Majakovskij, Marina Cvetaeva, and Daniil Harms. At first glance Majakovskij’s stature in official Soviet literature might seem to exclude him from this company, but it is arguable that enforced Soviet adulation “killed” this avant-garde poet for readers even more effectively than censorship and repression silenced dissident or émigré poets.6 For Yugoslav readers and translators in the 1970s and 1980s, who were not forced to read his work, Majakovskij’s innovative linguistic power and theatrical futurist pose were both pleasing and influential (as they were, indeed, to the Moscow school of young Soviet poets during 6. As Boris Pasternak famously comments in “Люди и положения,” after his death Majakovskij began to be cultivated forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine the Great, a second death and one for which he was not culpable [my paraphrase – SF].



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the Thaw). All three poets examined here were creatively oriented to the pre-Stalin period, not the drab Socialist Realism that followed. With two suicides and one prison execution, their tragic endings strengthen their aura of martyrdom to a repressive system, as they served the causes of truth and good poetry. Such positive cultural freight gives these poets additional value to the translators, who both revive them and tacitly claim their voices and personae as a part of projection of their own authorial images. In “the emphatic mode of translation,” a writer does not merely borrow words or ideas from someone else’s work: he or she leads the reader to the book, forms a bridge both in language and in reputation. Who we translate tells a lot about who we are or want to be, how we want to be read, seen, and understood as authors who read as well as write. Translation works as a particularly strong way to locate and recreate one’s own literary forebears and interlocutors, striving to be a poet like this poet, and each translator’s commentary on the work is revelatory.

Josip Sever’s Majakovskij Josip Sever (1938–1989) was a well-regarded and influential poet-translator in Croatia in the 1970s and 1980s. He published his first translation of Majakovskij, the poem “Lenjin,” in high school (in the 1950s), and his own poetry shows a strong influence of Majakovskij and other Futurists, particularly in its attention to phonetics, paranomasia, and word-formation. His book of translations of Majakovskij, Trinaesti apostol [The Thirteenth Apostle], appeared in 1982.7 It includes a short introduction (by author and translator Ljudevit Bauer) that presents Majakovskij and Sever in tandem; Majakovskij’s prose autobiography, “Я сам” [I Myself] in Russian but simply “Autobiografija” in Croatian; a selection of short, mostly pre-Revolutionary lyric poems; the play “Tragedija” [Vladimir Majakovskij]; three long poems (“Trinaesti apostol” [Облако в штанах, A Cloud in Trousers], “Čovijek” [Man] and “Revoljucija” [April 1917]); a selection of Futurist manifestos; a few short poems by other Futurists; texts by various contributors to LEF, including a 1923 article by Croatian Comintern member and poet August Cesarec on LEF in Yugoslavia; three short articles by Majakovskij; and a selection of letters. Thus, the volume is a miniature collected works, offering a broad sample of Majakovskij’s best writing and placing him among his most significant poetic contemporaries. “Облако в штанах” [A Cloud in Trousers] (1914–15), Majakovskij’s first big success, is probably his best-known pre-Revolutionary work. Sever creates a powerful translation and uses its title for his whole collection, but he chooses the preliminary title Majakovskij used as he composed the poem, “Trinaesti apostol” [The Thirteenth Apostle], rather than the better known “Cloud in Trousers,” which is Sever’s subtitle. Meaning undergoes many small changes for the sake of rhyme (Majakovskij’s “Вошла 7.

Sever also contributed translations of Majakovskij to several earlier publications.

 Sibelan Forrester

ты,/резкая, как “Нате!”” acquires a plural addressee in Sever’s “Ušla si ti,/oštra ko ‘evo vam!’”), but distortion of language norms creates a parallel feeling of “остранение.” Estrangement begins with use of the work’s preliminary title, rather than the one familiar to every reader of Majakovskij; this (like many elements of the book) hews to the persona of the young Futurist poet, not yet ossified into a compulsory Soviet monument. For readers not yet familiar with Majakovskij, on the other hand, the idea of a thirteenth apostle taps into existing cultural associations (religion, unlucky numbers, and dissonance with the familiar number twelve), perhaps provoking them to pick up the book in the first place. Sever’s choice of title, “Trinaesti apostol,” with the better-known “Oblak u hlačama” as the subtitle, also foregrounds the Russian poet’s outsize tragic and romantic pose. Majakovskij describes the thirteenth apostle in ways that show his speaker’s loneliness: too late or too distant to join the chosen circle, he is a Lermontovian figure of simultaneous tragic absurdity and holy aspiration. The title, especially read against the collection’s end matter, suggests the translator’s impossible desire to become part of the Futurist group himself, one of Majakovskij’s own circle, long after the fact and with similar tragic distance from any potential of realizing that desire. The book’s final section, “Umjesto pogovora” [Instead of an Afterword], illuminates Sever’s relationship to Majakovskij through personal conversations with Aleksej Kruchënykh. Each of the sixteen sections in this part is labeled “blijesak” [flash], except the last, which is headed simply “Još” [More]. The unliterary term “blijesak” both suggests new generic divisions and asserts a flash of inspiration or revelation in each episode – and not just one flash, but sixteen. The book’s introduction points out Sever’s debt to the Futurists, especially Majakovskij, and his service in making a translation so true to Majakovskij’s poetic methods (9–10). However, the translator’s afterword (or non-afterword) presents his own idiosyncratic version of these debts and connections. It describes his experiences in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s – during the Thaw, when possibilities for Russian culture looked brighter than they did for the ensuing twenty years, and when some authors whose work disappeared under Stalin (like Cvetaeva or Harms) became available again, albeit in small and censored doses. At the same time, a few pre-Revolutionary originals were still alive and willing to talk with visitors. Kruchenykh not only reminisces to Sever about Majakovskij, he also discusses his own career and achievements, shows a text “instead of a foreword” that Pasternak wrote for him, and thus weaves his visitor into a living, though attenuated, fabric of poetic and personal connections. Sever’s relationship with Majakovskij, as expressed in these translations, is one significant outcome of the meetings. Another is Sever’s fond contact with Gennadij Aigi, who becomes a supportive link to the new generation of Soviet poets. Sever is happy to share that acquaintance with another translator, Slavist Dubravka Ugrešić, perhaps in part because he identifies her not as a scholar or professor, but as “spisateljica” [author (feminine)] (251). As this translation makes clear, not only did the writers who were unavailable to pre-glasnost’ Soviet readers outside samizdat and tamizdat find translators in this period



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in then-Yugoslavia. Sever chooses an “overplayed” official writer, Majakovskij, though the relationship originated in the less suspicious period of his high-school language study and student visits abroad, and he concentrates on Majakovskij’s early, non-Soviet poems, working to redeem the poet from misuse by Soviet ideologues. Resuscitation means not just the generally Frankensteinian practice of translation, reviving authors who were buried by repression and censorship but also attention to writers like Majakovskij who were deadened by official approval. Trinaesti apostol, published in 1982, was still available for sale in Zagreb book shops five years later, when rampant inflation had made it extremely inexpensive: readers in Croatia were not lining up or trading favors to get hold of this edition, as readers in the USSR did even for censored Soviet editions of Mandelstam or Bulgakov printed in the 1980s. Nevertheless, Sever’s selection and presentation of Majakovskij offers a revivifying revision of a great Russian poet.

Danilo Kiš’s Cvetaeva Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) graduated with a degree in Literature from the University of Belgrade in 1958. Though best known in the West today as the author of stylistically unusual, often quasi-autobiographical prose works,8 he described the birth of his literary vocation in terms of poetry,9 and throughout his life he translated poetry into Serbian from Hungarian (which he spoke more or less natively), French (as he lived and taught in France for many years), English, and Russian. Kiš translated numerous poems by Marina Cvetaeva, publishing them in a separate edition of her work as well as in journals and other anthologies before and after his death.10 Like Irena Vrkljan, who also translated Cvetaeva, Kiš spent many years abroad. He may have been drawn to Cvetavea’s poetry not only for its quality, but especially for its treatment of loss, exile and separation. 8. Works by Kiš such as Garden, Ashes (Bašta, pepeo, 1965) have strong autobiographical elements, while the best known in the west for many years, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich [Grobnica za Borisa Davidovica, 1976], presents tragic (but also, often, darkly comic) stories of the victims of communism in Europe, most of them Jews. 9. Kiš, Bašta, pepeo, 1965: 224–25, esp: “Odmah [....] počeo sam da padam vrtoglavo u dubinu, i to nije bio san. U meni je treperio neki veličanstveni, sveobuhvatni ritam, a reći su mi izlazile na usta kao medijumu koji progovara na hebrejskom. [...] Izbezumljen od straha, sedeo sam još neko vreme zgrčen na sanduku, zatim saopštih svojoj majci glasom slomljenim od uzbuđenja: ‘Napisao sam jednu pesmu’” [At once [...] I began to fall headlong into the depths, and it was not a dream. Some grandiose, all-encompassing rhythm began to tremble in me, and words came to my lips as if to a medium who begins to speak in Hebrew. [...] Mad with fear, I sat for a while longer cringing on the trunk, then I informed my mother in a voice broken from excitement, “I’ve written a poem” (225). 10. Marina Cvetaeva, Zemaljska obeležja. Izbor i predgovor Milica Nikolić. Stihove preveli Danilo Kiš, Olga Vlatković (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1977).

 Sibelan Forrester

Kiš’s attitude towards Russia and the USSR was complex. It emerges strongly in Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča [A Tomb for Boris Davidovič], whose title story depicts pre-Revolutionary anti-Semitism as well as the betrayal of committed communists in the Soviet Union and abroad. All the stories show well-intentioned characters, mostly Jews, who suffer horrifically because of their faith in communism.11 Cvetaeva was (usually) an anti-Soviet poet: she emigrated in 1922 and spent many years in Prague and then Paris before returning to the USSR in 1939. Philo- rather than anti-Semitic, she married a man who (like Kiš himself) had a Jewish father and an Orthodox mother, and her husband and children all shared the name Èfron.12 Kiš’s partial translation of Cvetaeva’s long “Поэма конца” [Poem of the End] includes the section where she famously describes poets as “жиды” [Yids] and the world as a Christian neighborhood given to pogroms,13 which would naturally have drawn his interest. Finally, Cvetaeva’s work projects an elevated, Romantic view of poetry, combined with dark and subtle humor that must have felt congenial to Kiš: he translated many Russian poets, but none so much (and perhaps none so well) as Cvetaeva. I look here at one poem from among the many Kiš translated, written after Cvetaeva emigrated to Czechoslovakia. Kiš includes the dedication to Boris Pasternak (not present in all Russian editions of Cvetaeva), stressing her connections and relationship with the other poet. B. Pasternaku Raz-stojanje: vrste, milje... Nas su raz-stavili, raz-sadili, Da bismo bili tihi ko dva siročeta, Na dva razna kraja sveta.

Рас – стояяние: версты, мили... Нас рас – ставили, рас – садили, Чтобы тихо себя вели По двум разным концам земли

Raz-stojanje: vrste, daljina sura... Nas su razlepili, razlemili, I nisu znali da je to – legura

Рас – стояние: версты, дали... Нас расклеили, распаяли, В две руки развели, распяв И не знали, что это – сплав

Nadahnuća: žile i tetive... Nas su zavadili – već razbili, žive Raslojili... Uz zidove i rovove. Raselili su nas, ko orlove –

Вдохновений и сухожилий... Не рассорили – рассорили, Расслоили... Стена да ров. Расселили нас как орлов-

11. In English see Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, trans Duška Mikić-Mitchell (New York: Penguin, 1980). 12. For Cvetaeva’s biography see Simon Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World and Her Poetry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1987) and Viktoria Shveitser, Tsvetaeva, trans. Robert Chandler and H. T. Willets (London: Harvill, 1992). 13. See “Iz ‘poeme kraja,’ in Kiš, Песме и препеви, 240–43, especially 242–3.



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Zaverenike: vrste, daljine... Nisu nas rastrojili – samo su nas smutili. Po čestarima zemljine širine Nas su, kao siročiće, raz-putili. Koji je već – koji – zar kraj marta?! Razbili su nas – kao špil karata!

Заговорщиков: версты, дали... Не растроили – растеряли. По трущобам земных широт Рассовали нас как сирот. Который уж, ну который – март?! Разбили нас – как колоду карт!



(24. mart 1925)14



[To B. Pasternak

Dis-stance: vyorsts, miles... [They] dis-placed us, sup-planted, So we’d be quiet like two orphans On two different ends of the earth.

Dis—stance: vyorsts, miles... [They] dis—placed us, sup—planted, So we would behave quietly Over two different ends of the earth.

Dis-stance: vyorsts, pallid farness... They unglued us, unsoldered, And didn’t know that it was – an alloy

Dis—stance: vyorsts, distances... [They] unglued us, unsoldered, Separated with two hands, crucified [us] And didn’t know that it’s an alloy

Of inspiration: of vein and sinew... They made us quarrel – rather broke up, alive Flaked us apart... By walls and trenches. They settled us apart, like eaglesConspirators: vyorsts, distances, [They] didn’t untune us – they only bewildered us. Through the groves of the world’s latitude, They mis-directed us, like orphans.

Of inspirations and of sinews... Didn’t make [us] quarrel – scattered [us],

Which is now – which – really the end of March?! They broke us apart – like a deck of cards!

Which now, well which [is it] – March?!

14. Kiš 1992: 244.

Flaked into layers... Wall and trench. They settled us apart like eaglesConspirators: vyorsts, distances, [They] didn’t untune – they bewildered [us]. Through the slums of earthly latitudes They stashed us apart like orphans.

They broke us apart – like a deck of cards!]

 Sibelan Forrester

The poem’s regularity requires enough gymnastics from Kiš to provoke numerous differences between original and translation. He is careful to keep punctuation, ellipsis points, dashes and hyphens, as well as the broken line in the third stanza. One great formal difference, however, is immediately visible, a missing line in the second stanza. Where the Russian gives four verbs over two lines, “расклеили, распаяли,” [unglued, unsoldered] and “развели, распяв” [separated, having crucified], the single line in Serbian has only “razlepili, razlemili” [unglued, unsoldered], leaving out the other two verbs. The Russian “развели” could suggest that the poets divorced after being married (and were not just siblings, as the recurring reference to orphanhood implies), while Cvetaeva’s verbal adverb “распяв” [having crucified] asserts that they were separated even more painfully than by ungluing or unsoldering: they were crucified like Christ, or like the two thieves beside him. Perhaps Kiš considered the idea of poets’ crucifixion too strong or religiously incorrect,15 or perhaps he intended the blank (where form has led the reader to expect a fourth line) to echo the lacks and losses the poem describes. Again, almost unavoidably in this kind of translation, words that are added to maintain the rhyme introduce meanings not present in the original. In stanza II, “daljina sura” [ashen distance] for “дали” [distances] dilutes Cvetaeva’s sparser structure of nouns and verbs with an adjective, though since “sura” [ashen] might recall the word “surovo” [severe or harsh] the addition brings extra richness. One scholar of translation has criticized Kiš’s choice of “Po čestarima” for “По трущобам,” feeling that the words “как сирот” [like orphans] make clear that “трущобы” should be read as slums rather than groves.16 On the other hand, “čestari” [thick forests] may motivate an image of orphans in a fairytale rather than in a nineteenth-century novel, especially since Kiš’s next line gives “raz-putili” [set on different paths], putting the orphans on divergent paths in a dark wood, in place of Cvetaeva’s “Рассовали” [shoved apart]. He expands “сухожилий” [of sinews] to “žile i tetive” [of vein/artery and sinew], but “tetiva” also means a bowstring (like “тетива” in Russian; sinew was the original bowstring material). The addition makes the syllable count more regular, calls on a word where Russian and Serbian vocabulary overlap, and feels very much in the spirit of Cvetaeva. Comparing translation to original may also draw a reader’s attention to how the separated prefixes in the original, each followed by a pause (indicated by a dash), could sound for a moment like the word “раз” [once/one] in “раз, два, три” [one, two, three], as if the poem keeps setting off but not completing tense episodes of counting. This too cannot be conveyed in Serbian, despite the shared Slavic verbal prefix ras- or raz-. In general, changes Kiš made to preserve rhyme and make the meter work in Serbian tend to soften and dilute the poem, explaining more and limiting some possible interpretations. He offers “Uz zidove i rovove” [alongside walls and trenches], to 15. Though Kiš’s writing often dwells on Jewish characters and his Jewish (father’s) family’s fate, in his last testament he asked to be buried in the Orthodox rite of his mother’s family. See , consulted 10-28-2008. 16. Kirshova 2001: 309.



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rhyme with the following line’s “ko orlove,” but adding the preposition “Uz” and making the walls and trenches plural diminishes the threat of Cvetaeva’s stark “Стена да ров” [wall and trench], with its singularity suggesting execution by firing squad (a punishment for conspirators, after “Раз, два, три!” rings out?). The “un-Serbian” diphthong in “zidove i rovove” as read aloud contrasts with the sharply punctuating phonetics of “Стена да ров,” the masculine rhyme so difficult to convey in languages with rare final syllable stress, like Serbian. Kiš maintains feminine rhymes in the first two lines of the four-line stanzas, but not the masculine rhymes in every other line. As Marijana Kiršova points out, the penultimate line shifts “который март?!” to “zar kraj marta?!” to match the final rhyme with “karata” (Serbian genitive plural adds -a whereas Russian subtracts -a from second declension nouns, to give “карт”).17 This change moves the focus from an unrealized plan for a March meeting to surprise at how quickly the days pass, further from the realia of Cvetaeva’s relationship with Pasternak. Perhaps Kiš makes a point of retaining the poem’s dedication to Pasternak in order to balance that loss. Kiš’s writing on translation is both autobiographical and theoretical. He began translating early, precisely in order to learn to write: “In high school I continued to write poems and to translate Hungarian, Russian and French poets, primarily for stylistic and literary practice; I was preparing to become a poet and studying the literary craft.”18 The number of Cvetaeva poems among Kiš’s translations suggests that he continued to learn from her over time. He seems not to have translated her prose, whose lyrical saturation, recreation of childhood confusion and idiosyncratic (mis)interpretations, combined with intensity of observation and focus on a lost but strongly influential parent, have a great affinity with his own work. Kiš remarked, “I’m a big reader of poetry because I consider myself something of a poet manqué. Technically, I know exactly what to do, and I like translating poetry. But I realized that I can better express myself in prose.”19 He satisfied his poetic impulse in translations for artistic satisfaction as well as literary pointers. At the same time, his versions of Cvetaeva (still popular and widely posted on the internet, often without attribution) tend if anything to take the edge off her polemical voice, suggesting that her topics appealed to Kiš more than her style.

17. Ibid. 18. Kiš wrote, “U gimnaziji sam nastavio da pišem pesme i da prevodim mađarske, ruske i francuske pesnike, u prvom redu radi stilske i jezičke vežbe; spremao sam se za pesnika i izučavao književni zanat. Ruski su nam predavali beli oficiri, emigranti iz dvadesetih godina, koji su, zamenjujući odsutne profesore, držali s jednakom spremom predmete kao što su matematika, fizika, hemija, francuski, latinski.” (from “Izvod iz knjige rođenih” [Excerpt from the book of births], Mansarda, 112). 19. From The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1994, 14.1, cited from , consulted 4-7-2008. See note 2.

 Sibelan Forrester

Irena Vrkljan’s Cvetaeva Irena Vrkljan’s translation of Marina Cvetaeva’s long poem “Новогоднее” [New Year’s Greeting] into Croatian is presented quite differently from the other translations here. Vrkljan (born in 1930) uses “Novogodišnja” to open her second volume of lyrical autobiography, Marina, ili o biografji [Marina, or about Biography]. She thereby casts the poem’s light (or shadow) over the book that, as the title suggests, focuses largely on the Russian poet’s life and oeuvre.20 The first words after the title page are “Marina Cvetajeva// Novogodišnja,” followed by Vrlkjan’s translation of the text Cvetaeva wrote to and about Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke in early 1927, after his death in late 1926. Thus, Vrkljan’s book gives Cvetaeva the first word or makes Cvetaeva’s words her own, giving voice to the other poet with her own voice, rather than addressing Cvetaeva in the second person in a poem like Bella Akhmadulina’s “Uroki muzyki,” or analyzing “Новогоднее” in a lengthy essay like Joseph Brodsky’s.21 Though Vrkljan made money from translation early in her literary career,22 she does not know Russian; her own foreign language from home and school, as the autobiographical volumes make clear, is German.23 This translation of Cvetaeva was made in collaboration with a Russian speaker – a note following the poem thanks “Ina Tinzman of Munich” for help in reading and translating (Vrkljan 1986: 12). Cvetaeva’s poem is long, seven pages in translation, very elliptical, and difficult to follow without multiple readings and knowledge of the correspondence with Rilke.24 It offers Vrkljan several points to claim relationship. She can pick up Cvetaeva’s attitude towards Rilke, a combination of admiration and regret not unlike her own feelings for Cvetaeva. As a poem to Rilke that contains some German words, it also speaks of Cvetaeva’s relationship to German, almost as intimate as Vrkljan’s own. Vrkljan’s translator, Celia Hawkesworth, comments on the whole volume’s presentation of her life between Zagreb and Berlin, “The notion of ‘exile’ inherent in such a situation is closely related in her work to the idea of the necessary creative isolation of the artist” (221); creative 20. See Vrkljan, The Silk, the Shears, etc. Hawkesworth, a prominent and widely experienced translator, discusses the entire volume (though not Vrkljan’s translation of Cvetaeva) in “Irena Vrkljan: Marina, or About Biography,” Slavonic and East European Review, 659. 2 (April 1991): 221–231. The 1999 English edition, sensibly, presents the poem in a translation by David McDuff. Croatian-American scholar Gordana Crnković’s book Imagined Dialogues: Eastern European Literature in Conversation with American and English Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2000) devotes part of a chapter to the first volume of Vrkljan’s autobiographical prose, Svila, škare, emphasizing how Vrkljan’s writing works against “the closures of gender” (93–123). 21. Brodsky, “Footnote to a Poem.” 22. Vrkljan 1999: 77; 11, 14, 58, etc. 23. Ibid., 11, 14, 58, etc. 24. See Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters Summer 1926, trans. Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1988).



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isolation, its necessity and the pain caused by taking steps to ensure it, was a sore point in Cvetaeva’s relationship to Rilke.25 Almost the whole original poem is written with feminine rhymes,26 so Vrkljan need not struggle to find equivalents for masculine rhymes in Croatian, a language with hardly any end-stressed words longer than one syllable. Despite its syllabotonic regularity, the poem’s fragmented, elliptical style makes it friendly to Vrkljan’s own poetic preferences.27 Many of Vrkljan’s departures from the original amount to no more the usual compromises demanded by poetic translation, while others have a more tendentious effect. They tend to bring Cvetaeva herself more concretely into the poem and to alter her self-presentation to fit Vrkljan’s preferences. The word “любимая” [favorite, beloved, line 10] becomes “ljubavnica” [lover, mistress, line 10], a word Cvetaeva is most unlikely to have used of herself, at least in reference to Rilke. Indeed, she is not even writing about herself in that line, though she may well be thinking of herself – it is Vrkljan who introduces the first-person pronoun “ja” [I], absent in Cvetaeva. Many lines later, Vrkljan renders the masculine and general “смертнику в колодках” [a prisoner [masc.], condemned to death, in the stocks] (line 152) as “jednoj osuđenici u okovima” [a condemned woman in fetters] (line 149). The gender switch makes the phrase both more concrete and more applicable to Cvetaeva, the poem’s main female character. A few lines before the poem’s end, where Cvetaeva has “В небе – лестница, по ней с Дарами” [In the sky a ladder/staircase, on it with Gifts] (line 197), Vrkljan again inserts the first person pronoun: “Na nebu ljestve – na njima ja s DAROVIMA” [In the sky a ladder, on it I with GIFTS] (line 195). The added syllable places the speaker concretely in the scene, and capitalizing every letter rather than just the first D in “darovi” places greater emphasis on those gifts. Vrkljan seems to want Cvetaeva to represent certain qualities, to be braver than Vrkljan herself in her mores as well as her writing, and to represent a feminine creativity, the words and traces of bodily experience of a gender-marked, markedly female artist. Her translation updates Cvetaeva in subtle but telling ways. The prose of the rest of Vrkljan’s book also changes or “edits” the Russian poet in places. Vrkljan “misreads” Cvetaeva’s opus (unintentionally, I presume) when she claims that Cvetaeva never wrote about a dining room and is therefore vastly superior: “Marina nije nikada pisala o jedaćoj sobi. Njena prednost je u tom pogledu za mene nedoodstižna” [Marina never wrote about the dining room. Her superiority in that regard is unattainable for me] (1986: 29). Cvetaeva’s first published collection did in fact include a poem entitled “Столовая” [The Dining Room]; its depiction of uncommunicative family members at table might recall scenes from Vrkljan’s depiction of her 25. Ibid., 127–28. 26. The exception is the four-line stanza VIII, lines 161–65, where the second and fourth lines rhyme on “drug” and “Zvuk.” 27. Hawkesworth comments on Vrkljan’s suggestion, later in Marina, that “the consciousness is a kaleidoscope of associations with events and people” (226).

 Sibelan Forrester

own childhood.28 Cvetaeva’s putative “unattainable superiority” makes her an even less bourgeois poet than she really was, at least in her beginnings, and a less bourgeois model is what Vrkljan wants. One could call this misreading or a strong reading that seeks an admired predecessor for what the later poet needs. Indeed, it resembles Cvetaeva’s own readings of Rilke and other poets addressed in her work. While Vrkljan’s writing as a whole has no strong orientation towards or away from Russia, her prose speaks strongly against the modernizing and homogenizing influences of West European economics and culture, in favor of the more “Eastern” traits of then-Yugoslavia.29 In creating a strong female speaking self and enjoying her own contrariness, Cvetaeva fits well among the female artists (e.g., Charlotte Salamon) and suffering intellectuals (e.g., Walter Benjamin) to whom Vrkljan turns in her lyrical autobiography. Cvetaeva’s devotion to poetry above all other homelands described in her poetry or expressed in her biography may indeed represent an unattainable kind of superiority. The remainder of Marina, ili o biografiji is richly larded with citations from Cvetaeva, also in Vrkljan’s own translation.

Dubravka Ugrešić’s Harms Dubravka Ugrešić (born in 1949) is now widely known as a prose author and cultural critic. Over the past 15 years or so, she has extended the reach of her passionately engaged journalism beyond Croatian, former Yugoslav and Eastern European topics into many realms of contemporary discourse. She began her professional life with a dual identity as author and scholar (like Kiš, she earned a university degree in comparative literature). During the 1970s and 1980s she worked at the University of Zagreb and translated extensively from Russian into Croatian. Her translation of absurdist author Daniil Harms, Nule i ništice [Nulls and Nothings], was published in Zagreb in 1986. Ugrešić was also co-editor (with Aleksandar Flaker) of the series Pojmovnik ruske avangarde [Conceptual Dictionary of the Russian Avant-Garde, vol. I 1984], which put critical terms and the names of Russian avant-garde authors into a scholarly framework, encouraging students and scholarly readers in then-Yugoslavia and elsewhere to approach them as a culturally and intellectually interconnected movement. Ugrešić’s translation Nule i ništice contains nine sections. The first, “Umjesto predgovora” [In Place of a Foreword], is a properly absurd letter Harms addressed to two friends in 1932. The next seven sections offer selections of his prose and dramatic works, many short pieces variously arranged (1929–1940), including “Старуха” [Starica] (1939) and his literary anecdotes. The penultimate section is “Umjesto bilješke o piscu” [In Place of a Note on the Author] – the translation “Kako sam raskrinkao 28. In Cvetaeva’s first collection (Вечерний альбом [The Evening Album]), “СТОЛОВАЯ” (undated). Цветаева, Собрание сочинений в 7-и томах, vol. 1, 76. 29. Vrkljan 1999: 84–87, 93–94.



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jedno društvo” [How I figured out a society], a set of autocongratulatory notes by Harms, whose self-lauding tone recalls Russian ego-Futurist Igor’-Severjanin. Ugrešić’s translation concentrates on Harms’s prose but also includes several verse texts. The translator makes some interesting moves in Nule i ništice: for the 1925 short prose text “Basnja” [Fable], she renders Harms’s “волшебница” [enchantress] (II, 118) as “vila” (47) – a powerful South Slavic female folk spirit perhaps closest in English to a fairy (and familiar to young readers in the West thanks to J. K. Rowling and the Bulgarian quidditch team). In “Четыре иллюстрации того, как новая идея огорашивает человека, к ней не подготовленного” [Four Illustrations of How a New Idea Disconcerts a Person Unprepared for It, 1933; I, 273], Harms’s second set of “stage directions” is in marked high-style language, considerably more “literary” than the truncated dialogue it accompanies, and Ugrešić finds suitable equivalents: Slikar je odmah problijedio kao platno, I k’o prutić se zaljuljao, I iznenada preminuo. Iznose ga. [143]

Художник тут же побледнел как полотно, И как тростинка закачался, И неожиданно скончался. Его выносят. [I, 273]

[The artist immediately turned pale as canvas,/ And started to sway like a reed,/ And unexpectedly passed away./ [They] carry him out.] The variant form “k’o” rather than “kao” saves a syllable, while the high-style word “preminuo” ‘passed away’ renders the somewhat euphemistic “скончался,” though without duplicating the reflexive form of the original verb. The most interesting sections in this edition of Harms, however, are the materials that follow the translations themselves. The last part of the book is “Slučaj Harms” [The Harms Case], a series of letters (putatively?) from Ugrešić to her editor, dated between 1980 and 1986.30 The letters amusingly play out the translator’s frustration with the slow editorial review of the book. They also give copious biographical and critical information on Harms and his circle, by way of justifying to the editor why the translation would be valuable and worth publishing. The publisher’s inconsiderate delay tacitly explains why this edition appeared after two other translations of Harms, both mentioned in the letters with positive comments. Ugrešić identifies other places where she has managed to place translations of Harms, foregrounding her qualifications as reader, scholar and translator. She points to the ways Harms’s writing suits the modern era: “I wonder whether young people imitate Harms because he is suitable for imitation (the short story, close in structure to a joke) or have adopted his destructive

30. This “Harms Case” is apparently not related to the Yugoslav movie of the same title that came out in 1987.

 Sibelan Forrester

approach (with reference to traditional narration)? Or has everyday life, perhaps (I don’t dare say this out loud), begun to resemble that in Harms’s stories?”31 The epistolary genre suits this game of doling out information, presuming its newness for both editor and reader, while hinting at an amusingly unlikely “absurd” plot in which offstage violence is obliquely mentioned. Though we see only one side of the correspondence, readers can feel that they are seeing the “real” author in communication and negotiation with her publisher. The letters also interpret Harms’s style and manners as a strategy of self-mythologizing and “mystification,” very much like what comes to characterize Ugrešić’s later writing: “It’s interesting how Harms included himself in the concept of artistic activity. The self as an artistic work and the transformation of everyday life into an artistic concept, these are no rarity in the art of avantgarde groups in the twentieth century. Harms was first and foremost playing with authorship...”32 Pretending to let the reader read the correspondence over the editor’s shoulder and be privy to the book’s “back story,” she closes the correspondence with a letter putatively from Harms, addressed to her rather than to the editor, in Russian but with Croatian spelling, including some stiški, or ‘verses’ [diminutive and possibly pejorative], also transliterated without translation (238). The “mystification” that Harms would be aware of this translation and would write to congratulate her on it from beyond the grave draws on, but also possibly mocks, the kind of afterward that Sever entitles “In Place of an Afterword” and his pleasure in reproducing (in his own translation) Gennadij Ajgi’s letter to him. Ugrešić thus both reproduces and perhaps leads her reader to question such overidentification with the object of translation. At the same time, her original writing and authorial stance seem as strongly influenced by traits she points out in Harms’s work as Sever was by Majakovskij. The final text in transliterated Russian rewards the reader who knows that language and does not need Ugrešić’s translation – but who is, therefore, equipped to evaluate her version. Thus, even if Ugrešić appears here as a scholar-translator, providing highly informative scholarly notes (befitting the co-editor of the Pojmovnik ruske avandarge), her “back” matter makes clear that translation functions between art and science. Every one of these four translation projects shows how much a translator who is also a creative writer can learn from the process, how writers assimilate new material and ideas and therefore seek authors with whom they can have a productive, personal relationship, and how much interpretation is reflected in the finished translation. A translation always requires scholarship, implicit or explicit. Because these translators are all better 31. “Pitam se da li mladi imitiraju Harmsa zato što je pogodan za imitiranje (kratka prića po strukturi bliska vicu) ili su prisvoili njegov destruktivan (u odnosu na tradicionalno pripovedanje) stav? ” (215) 32. “Zanimljivo je kako je Harms u koncept umjetničkog djelovanja uključio i vlastitu osobu. Osoba kao umjetničko djelo, te pretvaranje svakidašnjice u umjetnički koncept, nije rijetkost u umjetnosti avangardnih skupina dvadesetog stoljeća. Harms se poigravao prije svega s autorstvom, ...” (219-20).



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known as original writers, their other work clarifies the role of the translation, why they chose or warmed to this author, and how their choice of author and original work illustrates or determines each one’s attitude towards Russian literature and culture. Each writer/translator’s image among a non-Russian readership may be enhanced or complicated by this engagement with or citation of Russian literature and culture.

Conclusion Two translators examined here, Kiš and Sever, died in 1989 (one of lung cancer, one in an accident). The end of the Soviet Union shortly after took much of the urgency from the East/West opposition and undid Yugoslavia’s privileged position as a point of access for physical or intellectual travel between Europe’s East and West, even before the violent end of Yugoslavia itself. Vrkljan has continued to publish prose in both German and Croatian and to live between Berlin and Zagreb. Ugrešić left Croatia for the West and is now a prominent writer and teacher in Western Europe and North America, though she still relies on her identity as a Croatian and (former) Yugoslav author. Translation of Russian literature into Croatian and Serbian, naturally, did not end with the fall of communism or the break-up of Yugoslavia. Draginja Ramadanski’s 1998 translation into Serbian of Cvetaeva’s Крысолов [The Ratcatcher],33 as Pacolovac, includes an introduction by North American Slavist and Cvetaeva specialist Catherine Ciepiela. This choice of introducer reframes the work of bringing Russian authors to new readers as a common endeavor among scholars whatever their hemisphere, though it necessarily has political meaning as well. Ramadanski invited Ciepiela to write this introduction in 1997, when relations between “rump” Yugoslavia and the United States were not particularly warm, making the introduction a gesture against isolation and opposition. The book itself came out shortly before the NATO bombing of Serbia, giving Ciepiela’s introduction additional power in support of culture and scholarship (though concurrent events surely distracted readers from the translation).34 Here, too, the Russian poet’s status as Other allows a special kind of contact between East and West, while the translator’s ability to translate both the introduction from English and the poem from Russian reaches across East/West language barriers in ways that resemble the earlier Yugoslav position of mediation.

33. See Angela Livingstone’s splendid translation into English, Marina Tsvetaeva, The Ratcatcher (London: Angel Books, 1999, and Evantson, IL: Northwestern UP, 2000). 34. Ciepiela commented (in a personal communication) that the introduction is one of her favorite publications precisely because of the complex messages enabled by the timing of its appearance. The print run was only 500 copies; this could be due to many possible causes: provincial publishing realities, the time’s economic difficulties, distraction by politics, or a continuing lowered interest in Russian literature in the post-Soviet era.

 Sibelan Forrester

My second post-Yugoslav example is one less of translation than of citation: Dubravka Ugrešić continues to mention Russian writers in her essays and creative prose, presumably in her own translation, though she no longer foregrounds that aspect of her writing. As one example, her 1996 book Muzej bezuvjetne predaje [The Museum of Unconditional Surrender] deploys Viktor Shklovskij, a Russian Formalist scholar, writer and scenographer who spent time in Berlin in the early 1920s, as a somewhat mysterious source of materials. ‘I have no desire to be witty. I have no desire to construct a plot. I am going to write about things and thoughts. To compile quotations,’ wrote a temporary exile a long time ago. His name was Viktor Shklovsky. (9)

Ugrešić supplies only the merest modicum of information on Shklovskij (“a temporary exile”) and does not dwell on his later return to the USSR. She presents him to her western reader as an unfamiliar name, in need of an introduction, as an insider who knows more than others and can demonstrate this as she provides his words to her readers. In her role of public intellectual, Ugrešić can continue to give her reader glimpses of Russian or Soviet cultural riches, hinting at her own much greater knowledge, installing the original authors in her own writing and perception where they can live a new kind of life.35 Translation continues to accomplish important things for her as an author: when she cites Russian or Soviet writing, she also translates it into Croatian, granting access to and wisely selecting from other people’s work, voices, political and intellectual credibility. (Her versions of excerpts of their writing, though not identified as her own work, then become the source for translations of her books into other languages.) Ugrešić’s attitude towards Russia has on the whole remained unchanged, though many of her writings about Croatia and other parts of former Yugoslavia, as well as her examination of “Yugo-nostalgia,” favor their “eastern” and socialist aspects.36 Former Yugoslavia, especially in her childhood when Russian/Soviet influence was strongest, emerges as a source of ideals she can use to reproach both the exYugoslav successor states and the societies in which her western readers live. In the electronic era, citations from Russian poetry in both Serbian and Croatian are all over the web (often without credit to the translator). These avant-garde poets are still beloved and alive, in life-giving versions. At the same time the position of Russian literature in Croatia and Serbia, and of Russian poetry in particular, has changed with geopolitical transformations. Russia no longer dominates Eastern European cultures 35. The same book includes quotations from Croatian Yugoslav author Miroslav Krleža. Ugrešić continues to write in Croatian, and continues to publish (sometimes with a slight delay) in Belgrade and Zagreb, but her primary audience has clearly shifted away from readers who know who Krleža is. 36. See the first part of “House Spirits,” in Ugrešić, Thank You for Not Reading, trans. Celia Hawkesworth with the assistance of Damien Searles (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), 173-77, on Yugoslav book culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s.



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through the military powers of the Warsaw Pact, though it can show its muscle by manipulating natural gas supplies. At home, the Russian government pays much more attention to journalism than to other verbal genres. While there are many superb poets writing in Russian today, there is no longer a poetry underground like the one Sever’s book evokes. If anything, it is only too easy for any Russian to “publish” his or her own poetry on sites like www.stihi.ru. The Russian poet is no longer a culture hero, but a poet like any other in the world; in Croatian or Serbian translation they no longer mobilize the same meanings. Of course, Yugoslavia itself is a relic of the past, and the literary scenes of the successor states have become new phenomena, more parallel to those in other Eastern European countries. Indeed, prominent poets writing in Croatian and Serbian (or Hungarian, or Lithuanian, or Macedonian) may now enjoy higher cultural status than living Russian poets: their lives and works represent or almost incarnate small languages and marginalized literatures in ways that big countries, with their more numerous writers, do not require. Translation of Russian poetry is still a vital topic, but it functions today in very different ways that are the topic for a different study.

Works cited Brodsky, Joseph. 1986. “Footnote to a Poem,” trans. Barry Rubin. In Less Than One: Selected Essays, 195–267. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Crnković, Gordana P. 2000. Imagined Dialogues: Eastern European Literature in Conversation with American and English Literature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP. Cvetaeva, Marina. 1997. Собрание сочинений в семи томах. Моscow: “ТЕРРА” – “TERRA” и “Книжная лавка – РТР”. –—. 1998. Pacolovac, trans. Draginja Ramadanski. Kanjiža: Umjetnička radionica Kanjiški krug. Dragojević, Nataša and Fikret Cacan. 1988. Svjetska književnost u hrvatskim prijevodima (1945–1985). Zagreb: Društvo hrvatskih književnih prevodilaca. Harms, Daniil. 1987. Nule i nistice. Edited and trans. by Dubravka Ugrešić. Zagreb: Zora. Hawkesworth, Celia. 1991. “Irena Vrkljan: Marina, or About Biography.” The Slavonic and East European Review 69.2 (April): 221–31. Kharms, Daniil. 1994. Даниил Хармс. Vol. II. Rассказы и сцены. Моscow: AO “Viktori”. Kiršova, Marijana. 2001. “Неке лингвистичке карактеристике две песме Марине Цветаjеве и њихових превода на српски језик.” In Преводна књижевност. Зборник радова ХIII– XXIII београдских преводилачких сусрета, 1987–1996, 306–11. Beograd: Udruženje književnih prevodilaca Srbije. Kiš, Danilo. 1983. Bašta, pepeo. Zagreb: Globus; Belgrade: Prosveta. –—. 1992. Песме и препеви. Београд: Просвета. Maiakovskii, Vladimir. 1955. Полное собрание сочинений в тринадцати томах (Москва: “Художественная литература”. Majakovski, Vladimir. 1982. Trinaesti apostol. Edited and trans. by Josipa Severa. Zagreb: Mladost. Markov, Vladimir. 1968. Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

 Sibelan Forrester Marković, Milena. 2001. “Библиографија превода Данила Киша: Посебна издања, избори, антологије.” In Преводна књижевност. Зборник радова ХIII-XXIII београдских преводилачких сусрета, 1987–1996, 301–05. Beograd: Udruženje književnih prevodilaca Srbije. Ugrešić, Dubravka. 1996, 1999. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, trans. Celia Hawkesworth. New York: New Directions. Vrkljan, Irena. 1986. Marina, ili o biografiji. Zagreb: Zora. –—. 1999. The Silk, the Shears, trans. Sibelan Forrester, and Marina, or about Biography, trans. Celia Hawkesworth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP.

Translation trouble Translating sexual identity into Slovenian Suzana Tratnik

Ljubljana, Slovenia This chapter explores the cultural context of post-communist Slovenia for the translation of Western lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgendered (LGBT) and queer literature and theory. Situating this period within the history of queer visibility in Slovenian society and culture, this chapter examines the challenges of translating theoretical categories and social types for which there are no Slovenian counterparts. The author, who is herself the translator of many seminal Western works of gay and lesbian fiction and queer theory, recounts her struggle to find solutions, often by assuming the authority to introduce new concepts and terms into the Slovenian language.

Introduction Translating contemporary American and British fiction into the Slovenian language, especially lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered (LGBT) literature and non-fiction in the field of Gender and Queer Studies, I quickly discovered that the process of translating is not one of simple transfer when the two languages in question do not share the same conceptual categories. In such cases, translation often involves inventing and reinventing one’s own language, re-signifying Slovenian words to express concepts related to sexual identity that simply did not exist in Slovenian culture. In translating such seminal works as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, I was forced to queer my native language in order to accommodate concepts and lifestyles that as yet had no place in Slovenian. Without doing this, I simply could not have transfered the contents of these works.

 Suzana Tratnik

Cultural context Slovenia is a small country in the Balkan region. The ancestors fo the Slovenians, the South Slavs, populated the area in the sixth century. The first Slovenian state, Kneževina Karantanija (Carinthia Principality), was established in the seventh century and lasted until 745 when it became a part of the Franconian country. At the same time the Slavs were becoming Christianized, they were losing their independence. In the fourteenth century Slovenia became a part of the Habsburg Monarchy and later on a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire (1867–1918). The first two Slovenian books, Abecednik (Spelling-book) and Katekizem (Cathecism), were written in the Gothic alphabet and printed in 1550 by the Protestant reformer Primož Trubar (1508–1586), considered the founder of the Slovenian written language. After the first World War Slovenia became a part of the Kraljevina Srbov, Hrvatov in Slovencev (Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenians), led by the Serbian Karadordjević dynasty (1918–1941), and after the second World War, on November, 11, 1945, it became one of the six republics of the socialist federation of Yugoslavia. On June, 25, 1991, Slovenia became the first republic of Yugoslavia to declare its independence. Slovenians are the most western Slavs in Europe. The native language is Slovenian, a Slavic language that uses the Latin alphabet, but many Slovenians speak other foreign languages, such as German, Hungarian, or Italian, especially those living close to the Austrian, Hungarian, and Italian borders. It is important to mention that some parts of Slovenia were divided and included in those three countries after the second World War making the Slovenians living there into ethnic minorities. During the Yugoslav period the official language was Serbo-Croatian, which was an artificial compound of Serbian and Croatian, but Slovenians could speak and write their own language in school and in everyday life. Translation has always played an important role in Slovenian culture. It was a way to bring foreign literatures and also cultural concepts into Slovenia. On the other hand, as Slovenian belongs to the so-called minor languages (spoken by two million people living in Slovenia and, of course, by Slovenian emigrés abroad), writers in Slovenia are forced to have their works translated, preferably into English, if they want to have readers outside their country. Or, as the Slovenian writer and editor Andrej Blatnik has remarked: “To exist means to be translated; those who write in English are thus already born translated, while others can become translated” (Blatnik, 2006). Accordingly, American and English writers are “lucky because they were born translated” (ibid.). Translation is also important in developing the Slovenian language so that it may assume a status equal to that of the other languages in the community of European languages. This is especially important today after decades of censorship and restrictions on the mass media curtailed the development of the language. Consequently, some linguists and cultural figures strongly oppose “the invasion” of foreign words into the Slovenian language, especially from English, Serbian and Croatian. Such invasive terms are called anglicisms, croatisms or serbisms. There is pressure to slovenize English



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words like gay into ‘gej,’ and punk into ‘pank,’ especially when it is not easy to find a Slovenian equivalent due to the absence of corresponding cultural circumstances. Translations in the field of sex/gender and homosexuality became popular in the 1980s with the emergence of feminist, gay, lesbian and other movements. Before that, homosexuality was treated mostly in works on psychiatry and psychology where it was mentioned as a psychological disorder. The first Slovenian translation of a book-length work on homosexuality was of a Dutch study on homosexuality, Orientation towards the Same Sex, by Dutch essayist Van Oertringen, published in Slovenian in 1937. The anonymous translator, who signed the translation with only his initials, S.K., transformed the neutral Dutch title into Protinaravna čud (Unnatural Disposition), which clearly presented homosexuality in a negative light. In the foreword S.K. even complimented the Nazi regime, explaining that this kind of sexual abuse was widespread among Slovenians and other Europeans, “with the exception of Germany, which had been successfully purged of such anomalies by Adolf Hitler when he rose to power” (Kuhar 2003: 23). However, this translation was quite unknown in Slovenia in later decades (due, perhaps, to its pro-Nazi views), as was the earlier samizdat publication Homoseksualnost (Homosexuality), published in 1926, which was a short essay by the Slovenian writer Ivan Podlesnik who wrote under the pseudonym Vindex. Podlesnik’s pioneering work, which draws mainly on the ideas of the German author Magnus Hirschfeld, was written in support of homosexuality (Kuhar, 2003: 23). Many works on homosexuality were rediscovered in the 1990s when the consolidation of modern feminist, gender and gay/lesbian ideas took place within the Slovenian activist movement and in academia. Among such newly valued discoveries is the novel Dečki (Boys) by the Slovenian writer France Novšak (1916–1991), which was published in 1938. Set in a boarding school, the novel is considered to be “the first Slovenian novel with homoerotic motifs” (Zavrl, 2009: 31). The first Yugoslav lesbian novel was written even earlier by David S. Pijade, a Serbian Jewish writer and translator, who also translated poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and Oscar Wilde’s novel A Portrait of Dorian Gray. The title of Pijade’s novel, first published in 1921, and republished in 2001, is Strast (Passion), and it is a romantic, tragic, and rather gothic tale of unfortunate love between two nuns. The author came from an intellectual Jewish family in the Serbian capital of Belgrade and died in a concentration camp; nothing more is known of his life, but his brother was a famous communist revolutionary, partisan and painter, Moša Pijade, who painted portraits of many famous Yugoslav personalities, including former Yugoslav president, Josip Broz Tito. The discovery of David S. Pijade’s previously unknown novel profoundly changed the history of lesbian literature in Yugoslavia in general and in Slovenia in particular, as I have tried to explain in my Lezbična zgodba [The Lesbian Story] (2004: 97–150). This novel gave a sense of a local lesbian culture, offering the possibility of a lesbian literary history before the gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1980s. Although the book offers a tragic picture of lesbian love, it also documents that such love was a part of urban life.

 Suzana Tratnik

An organized gay and lesbian rights movement began in Slovenia only in 1984 when the first Magnus gay cultural festival took place in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. At that time so-called “alternative culture” (that is, alternative to the prevailing socialist ideology in Yugoslavia) was very visible, but mostly in Slovenia. It consisted largely of the peace movement, punk music and culture, and the feminist movement. The first women’s group Lilit was established in 1985, and the lesbian group Lesbian Lilit (LL), in 1987. All of the groups mentioned were organized around NGOs and were generally recognized “new social movements.” The gay and lesbian movement was surely the newest one as before the 1980s there were no groups or even known social gay circles as in West European capitals, such as London, Berlin, and Paris. Homosexual culture and its very existence were silenced in Yugoslavia. Male homosexuality was criminalized in the Republic of Slovenia until 1977, while lesbianism was invisible and understood as less dangerous due to the prevailing patriarchal conception of sexuality. The first media representations in the 1970s appeared in writings on psychiatry and crime and followed the “five general principles underpinning the media construction of homosexuality [in Slovenia]: stereotyping, medicalization, sexualization, secrecy and normalization” (Kuhar, 2003: 7). Due to the suppression of gay culture, which was understood as a phenomenon of a rotten Western capitalist world which encouraged negative individualism, was prone to decadence, and opposed to the workers’ ideology and the spirit of collectivism, there was no information on homosexuality as a life style, let alone any positive representations. The mid-1980s generated the production of punk, gay, lesbian, and feminist fanzines, but they limited circulation. These alternative movements did not take place in the rest of Yugoslavia, except for the emergence of feminist/lesbian and gay groups in the Croatian capital of Zagreb and the Serbian capital of Belgrade. The reason for this is probably that Slovenian was a “northern” republic, closer to Austria and Italy and was considered more economically developed and more culturally open, which is also due to its history as a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Before the Second World War, the people of Slovenia were strongly influenced by German and Italian culture, and especially German culture. The German language was forced on Slovenians as the language of “a higher culture”. Moreover, many Slovenian intellectuals (poets, writers, artists, etc.) studied in Vienna at that time.

Queer strategies The 1990s saw the evolution of a lesbian and gay press: the Revolver magazine (Publisher Društvo Škuc – Students Cultural and Art Centre) and in 1991 the publication of the first book by the newly established gay and lesbian publishing house ŠKUC-Lambda. The aim was not only to present gay and lesbian culture but also to bring out books in the Slovenian language that had not yet been translated by the mainstream press and to give a chance to Slovenian gay authors. Up to now the Lambda series has published



Translation trouble 

more than sixty books and is widely recognized in Slovenia. Of the 82 total number of Lambda titles, 54 are translations: 20 from English, 15 from French, 5 from Spanish, 3 from German, 2 from Italian, and single translations from Dutch, Czech, Macedonian, Serbian, Japanese, Polish and Finnish. There is also a collection of modern European gay poetry, with 76 authors. One of the main critiques of Lambda, typically levelled by heterosexual writers or critics, is that there is no need to develop a “special lesbian and gay literature,” which is, according to them, obsolete because there is only one distinction to be made in literature: good or bad. This is the immediate context that both constrained and warranted my translation of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. The biggest problem I confronted was the almost total absence of terms and related concepts in Slovenian. When confronted with terms associated with a concept such as sexual identity that was previously unknown in the target language and culture, the translator typically has two options. The translator can: 1. Use the original English word without translating it but explaining it, including – in the text itself or in the paratextual material – an explanation of its cultural context and history. The translator may use the original English words that appear to have no equivalent in her/his own language, such as queer, queer theory, gaydar, sex/ gender dichotomy, passing as a woman or as a man, butch – femme relationships, drag queen or king, gender fuck. Their meanings can be explained in notes, although this is not a preferred strategy in the translation of fiction. When translating the novel The Trumpet by British author Jackie Kay, I had another problem in addition to gender terminology: there were numerous specific words used within jazz culture, such as false fingers, scating, musician and his cats. I couldn’t find them in any of the English-Slovenian dictionaries and not even in monolingual English dictionaries. When I talked to other translators and Slovenian musicians, they explained that they use the original terms and haven’t got a clue about how to translate such terms into Slovenian. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble represents real translation trouble for many Slavic languages. The sex/gender dichotomy was not recognized in the Slovenian language before the advent of feminist and gender studies. There is only one term for sex – spol. Another term, which may be translated as gender, is rod, but rod usually designates gender specifically in grammar. (Like most Slavic languages, Slovenian nouns are divided into masculine, feminine and neuter gender.) The translation of the sex/gender dichotomy therefore requires a mixture of literal translation and explanation. Sex is translated/explained as biološki spol (biological sex) and gender as družbeni spol (social sex). When translating Butler’s book I tried to explain all these distinctions in an afterword in order to help readers to understand the text’s central argument and to avoid any possible confusion of sex with gender. Translators may also choose to use the original words but with the Slovenian spelling. Gay has been spelled as gej for a long time in the Slovenian language. In fact, it

 Suzana Tratnik

became popular at the end of the 1980’s as a term used within the context of the gay movement, which started in 1984. The only terms available previously, such as homosexual,with its legal and medical connotations, or the derogatory peder (roughly equivalent to ‘faggot’), were no longer adequate within the new context of an open gay culture (see Kuhar 2003). Other examples of English words used with Slovenian spellings are drag – dreg, butch – buč, femme – fem, dyke – dajk, punk – pank, jazz – džez, blues – bluz. This is called poslovenjenje or slovenization of foreign words. But some people still prefer to use original English words, without slovenization, such as gay instead of gej, and drag instead of dreg. In any case, whether spelled in Slovenian or used as English words, these culture-specific items are obviously marked as foreign and so are deployed by some as prestige words and deplored by others as signs of Western cultural hegemony. 2. Use target language words in a new social context. The translator may try to search out some existing but forgotten or culturally-suppressed expressions in her/his own language but which may not perfectly align semantically with the original English expressions. For example, the disdainful Slovenian word možača, meaning ‘a mannish woman,’ is a rather weak counterpart for butch lesbian as Slovenian culture hasn’t known anything of a butch-femme culture in the past, and there is no expression for femme. So the translation of the cultural context is not and probably cannot be sufficient. Some translators believe that every foreign word can be translated into the Slovenian language and that it is the translator’s obligation to find an adequate expression. Some terms concerning sexual identity are translated literally or calqued. The translator may try to invent new Slovenian expressions which, of course, generally means placing familiar words in a new social context, and often explaining them in notes. Examples of this are the translation of drag queen/king as kraljica/kralj preobleke (queen clothes-changer) or of transgender as transspolen (transsexed), while transexual is typically translated as transseksualen. These are literal translations which don’t make much sense to someone who isn’t familiar with the context of drag performances or LGBT culture. For such a person, kraljica preobleke would simply mean someone who is the best at changing her clothes. The small glossary at the end is also a guide to this subculture. Translating such terms, therefore, must always be con/textual.

Translating Lesbian culture What happens with translations in the area of gender or LGBT fiction and non-fiction? Introducing new concepts and expressions into the Slovenian language (butch – femme, passing as women or men, queer) also means introducing the historical and sociological context of LGBT culture into Slovenian culture and literature. Sometimes, lesbian and gay terminology may appear out of place within Slovenian culture – this situation



Translation trouble 

may be best illustrated by the statement: “Oh, I just didn’t realize there could be a word for butch.” But Slovenian translations can also influence “the original texts” by encouraging interaction between the two languages/contexts. Having different words, or seemingly the same words but with different connotational meanings, or having no words for certain concepts in many Eastern European languages underscores the (non) situation of gay/lesbian culture, history, politics, studies, and the development of literature in those parts of the world. Moreover, the grammatical category of gender in the Slovenian language may also have quite serious effects on translations of gender-bending texts from English into Slovenian. I remember when the Slovenian translator of the poem Butterfly asked the American female poet Phillis Levin whether this butterfly was a female or a male, because without determining its gender, it was impossible to translate the poem. In Slovenian the butterfly is grammatically male and cannot be referred to as “it.” Along the same lines, I would like to mention a very interesting case of translation involving the novel Stone Butch Blues, by the American author Leslie Feinberg. It involved the translation of the American lesbian subculture of the 1950s into the contemporary, Slovenian lesbian subculture, which was totally unknown and suppressed until the mid 1980s. The phenomenon of the butch lesbian is not unknown in Slovenian lesbian culture but only by description as I found out during the interviews with lesbians which I collected in chapter “... v živo” (“ ... live”) in the anthology L, zbornik o lezbičnem gibanju na Slovenskem 1984–95 (L, An Anthology of the Lesbian Movement in Slovenia 1984–95) (1995). Some of the interviewed women knew the English expression “butch’’ but only the ones who could speak English. Others couldn’t think of Slovenian equivalents to butch or femm, but they described butch lesbians as the ones “that don’t like to be touched by their partners when having sex.” They especially don’t want their intimate parts to be touched. As the Slovenian description of butches always included this phrase, I decided to translate the novel title Stone Butch Blues as Nedotakljive, or ‘Untouchables.’ As the Slovenian expression is gender specific, it is clear that the title refers especially to women who are untouchable. I thought the title was also a proper description of the hard life of the stone butch Jess, the novel’s heroine, and of her friends, who made it through very difficult circumstances and, through all the political, social or hormonal changes, managed to stay somehow ‘untouchable’ or ‘untouched.’ When translating this novel I had to resolve another genuine problem that I hadn’t anticipated when I read the novel for the first time.There is a crucial moment in the book when the heroine, Jess, changes her sex by taking male hormones and starts to pass as a man. When Jess speaks to people whom she hasn’t met before, it is obvious that she presents herself as a man. So her direct speech is translated in Slovenian as spoken by a male subject. But when Jess is speaking to her friends that know “her” previous sex identity or when she is thinking to herself, these parts were translated as if spoken by a female subject. The original English text doesn’t have to deal with such “grammatical issues,” but Slovenian translation would be impossible or senseless without gendering

 Suzana Tratnik

Jess’s speech and internal monologues in different situations. Again, I had to decide whether she should speak or think as (a grammatical and social) man or woman.

Translator as author But some translations into the Slovenian language, with its grammatical category of gender, do not allow for such a solution. For example, when an author uses a first person storyteller without indicating his/her gender, this “secret” must inevitably be revealed in the Slovenian translation. However, this revelation may entirely alter the author’s intention of hiding the character gender. A good example of this is Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body (1992), which was translated into Slovenian in 2004 by Teodora Ghersini as Pisano na telo. The translator had to assign the storyteller a gender and she chose the female gender, perhaps because the author is a woman, thus committing the age-old fallacy of conflating author and narrator. In this way, the context of the novel becomes quite clear in the translation: the storyteller is a woman and a lesbian. Another example is the Slovenian translation of another British author Ali Smith and her short story “May” (published in her collection The Whole Story and Other Stories, 2003). Again, the gender of the first person storyteller is not known. The storyteller is living with another person and then, oddly enough, s/he falls in love with a tree. The first part of the story is told by the person who falls in love with a tree and the second part by the person who is the partner of the tree lover. The Slovenian translator decided that the storyteller of the first part is a woman and that the storyteller of the second part is a man. The translator wrote a short note at the beginning of story: “If a translator was male, the first part of the story might be told by a man and the second part by a woman. The optics of storytelling is, concerning gender, interchangeable” (Drev, 2004: 157). But within the gender dichotomy male-female, the translation establishes a distinctly heterosexual optics. One important thing, and probably also the intention of the author, is the malleability of sexual orientation, which remains unclear and undecided in the source text. In these cases, the translator’s decision to normalize and heterosexualize the source text definitely alters its effects.

Conclusion Most of the translations published at the ŠKUC-Lambda were reviewed at the press; in fact Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues was extremely popular and sold out. It made a valuable contribution to lesbian visibility and it named certain aspects of the lesbian scene, previously unnamed in Slovenia. For example, the novel explains the butchfemme concept, which was not unknown to Slovenian lesbians, but there was no name for it. In the title of the novel ‘‘stone butch’’ depicts a part of lesbian sexual behavior



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which is only descriptive in Slovenian lesbian culture: “The lesbian that doesn’ like being touched.” That is why I translated the novel’s title as Nedotakljive (The Untouchables), as it may also refer to lesbian survivors in very difficult and hateful social circumstances. Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble is today included in the curriculum of many courses at Slovenian universities and is said to be one of the most important theoretical works on gender and feminism. ŠKUC-Lambda’s books are sponsored by The Slovenian Ministry of Culture (Butler) and European translations by the EU program Culture 2000. Leslie Feinberg’s book was supported by The Global Fund for Women (USA) and Mama Cash Cultuurfonds (The Netherlands). These two foundations normally support activist projects and have stopped financing the publication of books. Lambda books are available in bookstores all over the country, also in public libraries and in The Lesbian Library and Archive in Ljubljana. The circulation is usually between 600 and 1000 copies, which is average for books published in Slovenia that are not expected to become bestsellers (like the translations of Dan Brown’s novels or Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks). They are an important resource to LGBT people who can now find the list on the Internet and read the books of their choosing. Some bookstores do provide special shelves with gender, feminist, women’s or gay and lesbian themes. Before the 1980s there was no clear information on such books, and few translations were available; those that were could be found in libraries only by chance or by a tip from a friend.

Works cited Blatnik, Andrej. 2006. “The Global ‘Market’, Individual Fate”. In Globalizacija sveta – marginalizacija lliterature? (okrogle mize – prispevki)/ Globalisation of the world – marginalisation of literature? (round tables – papers at the International Writers Meeting – PEN). Ljubljana: PEN. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, London: Routledge. –—. 2001. Težave s spolom: feminizem in subverzija identitete, trans. Suzana Tratnik. Ljubljana: ŠKUC Lambda. Feinberg, Leslie. 1993. Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books. –—. 2000. Nedotakljive, trans. Suzana Tratnik. Ljubljana: ŠKUC Lambda. Kay, Jackie. 1998. Trumpet. London: Picador. –—. 2005. Trobenta, trans. Suzana Tratnik. Ljubljana: ŠKUC Lambda. Kuhar, Roman. 2003. Media Representations of Homosexuality, Ljubljana: Mirovni inštitut/ Peace Institute. Smith, Ali. 2003. The Whole Story and Other Stories. London: Hamish Hamilton. –—. 2004. “Maj,” trans. Miriam Drev. In Začetek nečesa velikega: nove britanske pisave, edited by Diran Adebayo, Miriam Drev and Polona Glavan, 155–173. Ljubljana: Študentska založba. Tratnik, Suzana. 1995. “... v živo.” In L, zbornik o lezbičnem gibanju na Slovenskem 1984–95, edited by Suzana Tratnik and Nataša S. Segan, 136–157. Ljubljana: ŠKUC Lambda.

 Suzana Tratnik –—. 2004. Lezbična zgodba – literarna konstrukcija seksualnosti. Ljubljana: ŠKUC Lambda. Winterson, Jeanette. 1992. Written on the Body. London: Vintage Books. –—. 2004. Pisano na telo, trans. Teodora Ghersini. Ljubljana: Šent. Zavrl, Andrej. 2009. “Dečki med erotiko in moralo: telo, spol in spolnost v prvem slovenskem homoerotičnem romanu” [Boys between Eroticism and Morality: Body, Gender and Sexuality in the first Slovenian Homoerotic Novel]. Jezik in slovstvo 54.5: 103–113.

part ii

Subtexts

Between the lines Totalitarianism and translation in the USSR Susanna Witt

Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Literary translation in the Soviet Union may well be the largest more or less coherent project of translation the world has seen to date – largest in terms of geographical range, number of languages involved and timespan; coherent in the sense of ideological framework (alllowing for fluctuations over time) and centralized planning. The chapter demonstrates the relevance of literary translation as an object of research within the broader context of Soviet culture. With a focus on the Stalin period, it draws attention to translation as a pragmatic “no man’s land,” open to initiatves on the part of different agents. Drawing on Toury’s (2005) application of the concept of “culture planning,” the article pays special attention to the use of interlinear trots, or podstrochniki, as an institutionalized “creative space” between source and target texts. Soviet practices, it is argued, may prompt a reconsideration of common concepts such as source language, target language and translational agency. Thus, the author of a translation is not a humble screw in the machinery, he is the machinery itself. Mark Tarlovskii1

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the establishment of literary translation as an object of research within the broader context of Soviet culture, with a focus on the Stalinist period. The task is twofold: to demonstrate the relevance of some notions and approaches from translation studies to the field of Soviet culture studies, and to suggest how the Soviet material may prompt a reconsideration of common concepts such as source language, target language and translational agency. The intention is not to present an overall picture of the field of literary translation in the USSR, rather to outline its context and draw attention to some cases of specific significance. 1. “Takim obrazom, avtor perevoda – ne skromnyi vintik v mashine, on – sama mashina” (Tarlovskii 1940: 263). All translations in this article are the author’s if not otherwise indicated.

 Susanna Witt

As a point of departure, introducing some of the themes involved in such a task, I will relate an episode from the career of Arsenii Tarkovskii, poet and translator (and father of the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovskii), which became a piece of Soviet intelligentia folklore. Late one night in spring 1949 there is a knock on the door at Tarkovskii’s flat in Moscow, not far from the Kremlin. He grabs his little bag, packed in advance for such situations, but is told to leave it behind. He is not taken to Lubianka (KGB headquarters); instead, the car stops in front of the Central Committee building on Staraia Square’. There he gets a magnificent reception. He is told that he, Tarkovskii, has been chosen to translate Stalin’s youth poems for a jubilee edition, planned as a surprise gift to the Leader on his 70th birthday. Tarkovskii is startled but reluctantly accepts the offer. An enormous portfel’, or briefcase, made of crocodile leather is handed over to him, and together with it he is brought back home to his worried wife. The briefcase appears to contain the following: Stalin’s poems in Georgian; the same poems written in cyrillic characters; a phonetic transcription of every word, every line; a description of the rythmic and metric pattern of each poem; a scrupulous interlinear trot, on podstrochnik, with many variants and commentaries; a Georgian-Russian glossary with extensive explanations of the semantic nuances of every word in the poems; a brilliant philological analysis of all the texts; a rich commentary on geography and literary history related to the poems. All on snow-white high quality paper in morocco binding. Tarkovskii sets about working, filled with horror. Luckily, the Great Leader’s juvenilia turn out to be rather simple, without complicated metaphors; they are traditional, pseudo-popular in style. Mainly about nature, the mountains, the fields, the moon, violets and roses. Having completed a major part of the poems, Tarkovskii is suddenly taken again by limousine to the Central Committee, together with the briefcase and the translation in progress. Now he is told that comrade Stalin has found out about the plans and “with his characteristic modesty” has disapproved of them. The work therefore has to be terminated. Deeply relieved, Tarkovskii hands over the crocodile leather briefcase and prepares to go. After a short while he suddenly gets it back as “a humble gift” from his commissioner. At home he opens the familiar briefcase. Now it is stuffed with money. The story about how Tarkovskii translated Stalin, in itself a historical fact (Tarkovskii 1991–1993, vol. III: 426), exists in different versions. The present one belongs to translator and poet Vladimir Levansky, “written down by the author from the words of Arsenii Aleksandrovich Tarkovskii” (Levanskii 1998). 2 The story is illustrative in several respects. It highlights the question of translation and power, touches upon the significance of interlinear translation in the Soviet context and, in addition, demonstrates the nature of much of the source material concerning official Soviet translation practices, which to a large extent is located in oral tradition, memoirs, diaries, personal letters, etc. 2. Tarkovskii was apparently not the only translator of Stalin’s poetry. At least four translators are reported to have had similar experiences (Vitkovskii 1998: 13).



Between the lines 

Totalitarianism and translation Literary translation as a specific cultural phenomenon in the broader context of Soviet culture has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention. In fact, the subject is conspicuously absent in works on the epoch from within several fields where one might expect it to appear.3 Yet its hetereogenous functions in the totalitarian context lend it crucial importance.4 Translation from various languages was to contribute to the creation of a global Socialist Realist canon, as well as a Soviet canon of “representative” expressions of national cultures from within the empire (thus also becoming a matter of nationalities policy). At the same time, as is well known, it became a haven at times for otherwise unpublishable authors like Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Zabolotskii and Arsenii Tarkovskii. Tarkovskii was able to publish his first book of original verse only during Khrushev’s thaw in 1962, when he was 55.5 And most important: the status of the translated text, by way of its very ontology, challenges the common view of Stalinist language and culture as monolithic and largely monologic.6 3. On one hand, translation is not treated in cultural, linguistic and sociological studies dealing with the Soviet epoch, such as Smith (1998), Brooks (2000), Gorham (2003) or Grenoble (2003). On the other hand, works which focus on problems of translation and power (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002) or translation and ideology (e.g., Calzada Perez 2003) do not include material on the Soviet Union, favoring instead previously colonized parts of Asia, Africa and South America. As for the problem of totalitarianism and translation, it is significant that a work like the four-volume Censorship. A World Encyclopedia (Jones 2001) under the heading of “Translation” includes sections on Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Spain under Franco, but leaves out the Soviet case. Soviet scholarship on literary translation was extensive, but largely took a strictly philological approach (see, for example, the annual publication Masterstvo perevoda, Issues 1–9, Moscow, 1959–1979). Toper’s study (2000) has a broader scope, but leaves out the period 1920–1950 altogether. As for Western studies Friedberg (1997) provides a comprehensive overview, which includes sections pertaining to the Soviet era, while Leighton (1991) presents the “Soviet school of translation”. 4. Although the content and limits of the term “totalitarian” have been debated for a long time, its application to Soviet society of the 1930s and 1940s seems questioned by few; in the present article one aspect of totalitarianism is of particular relevance: the pervasiveness of ideology, putting ideological constraints on every single utterance (and its subsequent reception) in any public context. 5. The collection, Pered snegom (Before the Snow), was about to be printed in 1946, but publication was halted by an austere turn in cultural politics of that year, and Tarkovskii had to continue to translate, mainly from the literatures of Caucasus and Central Asia. This is the experience alluded to in his poem “The Translator” (Perevodchik): “Akh, vostochnye perevody, /Kak bolit ot vas golova.” (Oh, you Oriental translations,/what ache you cause my head) (Tarkovskii 1991–1993, vol. I: 92–93). 6. Describing the emergence of this “party-state model (voice) of language,” Michael Gorham somewhat distances himself from the term “monologic” but he does not elaborate on this reservation (2003: 178).

 Susanna Witt

It is generally assumed that the forms of Soviet totalitarian discourse were finally established by the middle of the 1930s, taking physical shape in the newspaper Pravda, which by that time had reached its exclusive status in the Soviet media landscape. Whereas in the early 1920s Pravda had been but one authoritative word among many, “in the mid-1930s the newspaper was commonly assumed to express Stalin’s voice” (Brooks 2000: 113). The coordinates of this discourse were set in a series of canonical documents and dogmas approved of at the time: the doctrine on Socialist Realism proclaimed in 1932 and broadly announced on the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, the “Stalin Constitution” of 1936 and the 1938 “Short Course of the History of The All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks).” In what way, then, do translations challenge a “monologic” view of the regulated, officially sanctioned culture, referred to by the poet Mandelshtam as “the book of Stalin”?7 They do so because a work of translated literature is always a double text, in which the original co-exists with the translation. Some implications of this awareness have been explored by Theo Hermans (1996) from a narratological perspective. Positing the existence of the translator’s voice as “an index of the Translator’s discursive presence in the text” (1996: 27), Hermans demonstrates how this voice may reveal itself in certain cases (paratextual intervention, self-reflexive references, contextual overdetermination) in the text itself. And, as Hermans argues, this voice must be postulated even if it doesn’t surface in any traceable form, it “is always present as co-producer of the discourse” (1996: 42). The concern of the present article is not so much the “Implied Translator,” discussed by Hermans, as the implications of this postulate for the biographical translator and issues of translational agency. A translated work as a whole in the most radical way poses questions as to authorship and responsibility, a problem of central importance in the totalitarian context. Mikhail Bakhtin, in his seminal article “The Problem of Speech Genres” (1953/54), provides an analysis of the utterance which might be brought to bear also on translations.8 Every word (in Bakhtin’s sense) becomes a “foreign word” (chuzhoe slovo) when it is included in the utterance of the translator. In fact, a translation may be regarded as a paradigmatic example of the play between “one’s own word” (svoe slovo) and the foreign word, or word of the other, which Bakhtin observes in any utterance. In particular, the doubleness of a translation pertains to Bakhtin’s thesis about the dual expression of such embedded foreign speech: “The other’s speech thus has a dual expression: its own, that is, the other’s, and the expression of the utterance that harbors the speech” (Bakhtin 1986: 93).9

7. The expression, stalinskaia kniga, is found in Mandelshtam’s “Stansy” from 1937 (1990, vol.1: 316–17) and discussed in Cavanagh (1996: 128). 8. Bakhtin’s understanding of an utterance is extremely broad: “from the single-word rejoinder to a large novel” (Bakhtin 1986: 61–82). 9. Translation slightly changed for greater accuracy.



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Thus a translation is never monologic but includes “[e]choes of the change of speech subjects and their dialogical interrelations” (Bakhtin 1986: 93). The translation emerges as a model for the utterance as such, because: any utterance, when it is studied in greater depth under the concrete conditions of speech communication, reveals to us many half-concealed or completely concealed words of others with varying degrees of foreignness. Therefore, the utterance appears to be furrowed with distant and barely audible echoes of changes of speech subjects and dialogic overtones, greatly weakened utterance boundaries that are completely permeable to the author’s expression. (Bakhtin 1986: 93)

The borderline between “one’s own” and “the foreign” in an utterance can therefore be compared to a membrane with osmotic properties, and what is essential: responsibility for the words is in a state of constant oscillation. Of particular interest is Bakhtin’s discussion of reaccentuations (1986: 89, 91). Though Bakhtin did not deal with translation theory, reaccentuations come very close to the essence of the translator’s work: the translator (who in this case must be regarded as author) may, with his own expression, reaccentuate the foreign word, “representative of another’s whole utterance from a particular evaluative position” (Bakhtin 1986: 89). The play between “one’s own” and “the foreign” in a translated utterance – and subsequently, the distribution of responsibility between the speech subjects – becomes even more complicated when it comes to translation from interlinear trots (podstrochniki), that is, the words of a third party, the use of which was widespread in the Soviet Union.10 Literature from the national republics was more often than not translated into Russian in this indirect way, and the method was used when translating from one national language into another as well (see Friedberg 1997: 172–177). Although, as noted by literary scholar Mikhail Gasparov, the practice is of great theoretical interest, it has been largely neglected (2001: 261). Translation may in effect be regarded as one of several institutions concerned with the mediation of meaning in the process of producing a Soviet literary work, others being the state censorship, editorial departments, literary criticism, etc.11 The practices of these institutions all implied the potential co-existence in the final product of different voices, which in a sense shared the responsibility for the utterance.12 Naturally, 10. In some cases authors of the original works themselves provided translators with these interlinear trots (see discussion below). 11. The main censorship body in the USSR was Glavlit (the Main Administration for Matters Concerning Literature and Publishing Houses); for an interesting internal account of its work from 1933, see Clark and Dobrenko 2007: 261–263. An important (and understudied) role in the text production was played by the editors of Soviet journals and publishing houses, whose responsibilities and practices often differed from those of their Western colleagues. For an account of an editor’s work with translated literature, see Shakhova 1993. 12. For an illuminating example of Politburo (another censorship body) co-authorship in the production of a play, see Clark and Dobrenko 2007: 270–272.

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these institutions were often interacting. It has been noted that, for example, in some periods translated Western literature “as distinct from the original, Soviet, enjoyed much greater leniency on the part of the censorship” (Blium 2000: 225).

Soviet translation as culture planning In the pragmatic sense outlined above, literary translation constituted a kind of noman’s land in the Soviet cultural space. As such, it could be utilized for different purposes by different agents of the literary process. In order to map out this area and account for translational behavior under such circumstances, it is useful to supplement the Bakhtinian perspective on translation as a play between “one’s own” and “the foreign” with the more operative notion of culture planning. In an article on the functions of fictitious translations, Gideon Toury applies culture planning, defined as “any attempt made by an individual, or a small group, to incur changes in the cultural repertoire, and the ensuing behaviour, of a much larger group” (2005: 9), to one instance of Soviet use of pseudo-translation: the works of the Kazakh poet Dzhambul Dzhabaev. Although very brief and based on highly limited source material (the memoirs of composer Dmitrii Shostakovich as related to Solomon Volkov), Toury’s analysis touches on important issues and deserves to be developed further. First, in the Soviet context, not only the practice of fictitious translation but also translation as a whole may be profitably analyzed in terms of culture planning. Second, the claim that planning in the case of pseudo-translations in the Soviet Union was “imposed from above” (2005: 14) implies a neat dichotomy which was not always there.13 When we make a distinction between “culture planning operations” that were initiated from above (presumably pursuing official explicit or implicit goals) and from below (pursuing individual goals) respectively, we have to bear in mind that these were not always easily disentangled. As we shall see, they could interact in individual cases of translation.

Soviet projects and practices In historical perspective, the notion of culture planning seems in fact to be exceptionally well-suited to describing the dynamic role of translation in Russian culture. Translations have often been a tool, instrumental at crucial stages of cultural reorientation, such as in the process of Christianization, during the Westernization initiated by Peter the Great, and the formation of a Russian literary language in the eighteenth century.

13. See also Even-Zohar’s definition, implying an “either-or” situation: “Culture planning is conceived of as a deliberate act of intervention, either by power-holders or by ‘free agents,’ into an extant or a crystallizing repertoire. (2002: 45).



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This aspect is alluded to and aptly expressed in Pushkin’s 1830 dictum that “translators are the post-horses of enlightenment.” After the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, official attitudes toward translation were initially positive in accordance with the internationalist pathos of the time. Translations should give the masses access to the cultural heritage of all nations and contribute to a sense of solidarity with workers and peasants of other countries. Significant here is the huge translation enterprise Vsemirnaia literatura (World Literature), launched in 1918 and associated with the names of Anatolii Lunacharskii (the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment) and Maksim Gor’kii, which in a three-year period intended to publish 800 volumes and 2000 pamphlets of carefully selected Western European and American writing (Friedberg 1997: 21). Even though the real outcome of the project was more humble, it was remarkable enough. World Literature provides an interesting case as an arena of potential conflict between culture planning from “above” and “below” respectively: the project as such constituted a clear case of the former, but the translators engaged in it were largely recruited from among writers with prerevolutionary careers, likely to have strong individual agendas, such as Aleksandr Blok, Nikolai Gumilev and Georgii Ivanov. This problem shines through in a Soviet account of the editorial activites: The heterogenous make-up of the staff made the work of the publishing house difficult. Deep principal disagreements surfaced especially in the process of selecting works for publication. Some members of the editorial board attempted to avoid books of pointed political content, falling into apoliticism and objectivism. Far from all of the participants of “World Literature” were ‘re-educated’ and took sides with the Soviet authorities, but at the publishing house all of them worked honestly and conscientiously and objectively contributed to the development of the culture of the victorious people. (Shomrakova 1967: 177–178)

By the mid-1920s World Literature was liquidated. For the supply of translations from Western literature another publishing house, the Leningrad-based Academia, now grew in importance, launching in 1927 its series Treasures of World Literature. Although Academia continued its activities until its incorporation into the State Publishing House for Literature in 1937, there was a gradual shift in official views on translation from the end of the 1920s, that is, from Stalin’s ascension to full power. The decrease in demand for translations from Western European languages, especially poetry, corresponded to the isolationist tendencies which made themselves felt at the time (Friedberg 1997: 112). Translations now gained importance as an element of nationalities policy, regarded as a tool for holding together the many different republics and nationalities of the Soviet empire and as a means of communication between cultures. In Soviet discourse, the role of the translator was often described as that of a propagandist of friendship between peoples (Leighton 1991: 18). In reality, however, translation under these circumstances was far from being a neutral activity of fraternization; it was a process that could be analyzed in terms of power and subjection. It is

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noteworthy, for example, that although dominating official attitudes from the end of the 1930s largely denounced “literal translation” (bukvalizm) and promoted free translation (in the brand of “realist translation”), this applied unconditionally only to translations into Russian; for translations from Russian into minority languages “literalism” was in fact encouraged (Friedberg 1997: 184). Literary translation by the 1930s was already part of a greater planning activity, that of Soviet culture as a whole, which gained momentum after the party resolution “On Reconstructuring Literary and Arts Organizations” of 23 April 1932 by which central control was established over all spheres of cultural life, and the subsequent proclamation of the doctrine of Socialist Realism, which was to affect all expressions of artistic creativity. In the middle of the decade, translations from languages of the national republics took on a special function. They were used to introduce a new genre into the Russian literary system: portrayals of Stalin in a panegyric, “hymnologic” style. Prior to the 17th Party Congress in 1934 there had been no poems about Stalin, and during the First Congress of Soviet Writers that same year the ideologically perceptive Aleksandr Fadeev declared that Soviet prose writers had not yet reached the maturity and skills to carry out such an important task as portraying Stalin in literature (Fleishman 1990: 195). But now the press started to publish work after work by “national poets” from the peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia praising the Leader. The Russian vocabulary was enriched by several new words designating “bard” or “folk singer” in different national languages; most frequently encountered were the Turkic akyn and the Caucasian ashug. This was the context of Toury’s example. The 90-year old akyn Dzhambul Dzhabaev from Kazakhstan, often referred to by his first name, was the most famous of these bards, together with 65-year-old ashug Suleiman Stal’skii of Dagestan, who received much publicity during the Writers’ Congress in 1934. Why did these figures appear at this very moment? The official demand for voices, and popular voices in particular, from national republics in the periphery should probably be seen in connection with the idea of the Soviet Union as a “democracy of all the peoples” (obshchenarodnaia demokratiia), which was to permeate the new constitution. With this new ideological line the concept of “nationality” (narodnost’) was put into the fore and had to be taken into account by every worker in the cultural field (Fleishman 2005: 369).14 Such a connection is supported by the fact that the flow of translated folkloric material in Pravda peaked during the months preceding the passage of the constitution on 5 December 1936. Dzhambul’s poem on the topic, “Stalin’s 14. Sometimes translated as “official nationality,” narodnost’ expressed the idea of a people, particularly the Russian people (Brooks 2000, 118); it was “a broad term which signified that works should be accessible to the masses, imbued with the national (and sometimes folk) tradition, and patriotic (or even statist).” (Clark and Dobrenko 2007: 147). Narodnost’ “functioned as a key value of Soviet cutlure that signified at the same time both loyalty to the regime and the essential quality of its people, with ever stronger tinges of Great Russian chauvinism.” (Clark and Dobrenko 2007: 478).



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Great Law,” was published on 15 June 1936 as a kind of sequel to the publication of the draft constitution three days earlier (“I praise the great Soviet law, /the law according to which happiness will come, /the law according to which the steppe will bear fruit, /the law according to which the heart will sing,” and so on). In a broader perspective, the wave of Oriental Stalin panegyric may also be situated in the context of what Jeffrey Brooks (2000) has labelled “the moral economy of the gift,” that is, a scenario underlying public culture during the Stalin era, according to which the subjects were endlessly to express their gratitude for all the goods they had been provided by the Leader. The Oriental panegyrics could be regarded as such an expression on the part of the liberated peoples of the periphery, bearing witness to the prosperity of the nationalities under Soviet rule. The public narrative generated by “the economy of the gift” presupposed that the subjects could never adequately compensate the Leader for his boundless generosity. This gives us a key to the episode, referred to in the beginning of this article, of Tarkovskii translating Stalin – one of the most striking examples of the use of translation within this “economy.” On his 70th birthday, the celebration of which was “perhaps the most outlandish act of the performance” (Brooks 2000: 219), Stalin was to receive his own poems because the only one who was truly worthy of authoring a gift to the Leader at this point was the Leader himself.15 In one essential respect the Oriental panegyric as represented by figures like Dzhambul Dzhabaev and Suleiman Stal’skii differed, however, from culture planning “from above” by way of translation during earlier epochs. As already mentioned, the status of the source texts involved here was highly dubious. The Russian texts of such bards were apparently to a significant extent produced from manipulated or fictituous originals, a fact which became common knowledge within certain circles already during the Soviet period (as is evident from Toury’s source – Shostakovich’s recollections). Translator and philologist Aleksandr Zhovtis, living at the time in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, talks about “the purposeful fuss (voznia) around Dzhambul, about which a very broad circle of writers as well as non-writers was informed” (1995: 61).16 The practice even gave birth to a term, dzhambulizatsiia (dzhambulization), coined by translator and translation scholar Evgenii Vitkovskii: “The dzhambulization lasted for half a century to disappear only in the years of perestroika. Every single one of the literatures of the North Caucasus was dzhambulized [...]” (1998: 13). Dzhambul (or Zhambyl, the Kazakh form) was not, however, fictitious as a person. He was physically present on many occasions in the public life of Moscow from 1936 until his death in 1945, lending authority to the translations of his texts and performing himself in his native language. Arguably, he was a prominent representative of the rich oral song tradition of his native land, the Semirech’e region of South-East Kazakhstan, where he was born into a nomad family in 1846. The problem is that there 15. For an example of translations as an element of the “economy of the gift” in the practice of Boris Pasternak, see Witt forthcoming. 16. For cases of manipulation witnessed by the author himself, see Žovtis 1995: 57–59; 122–123.

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seems to be no biographical accounts prior to the period of his late Soviet fame. The basic elements of his official biography are the following: An apprentice of the famous akyn (bard) Suiunbai, Dzhambul won mastership in the traditional way by challenging other akyns in song duels, aityses, accompanying himself on the dombra (a string instrument which together with the fur cap became his distinctive mark).17 The sources usually stress the “progressive” content of Dzhambul’s pre-revolutionary poems, which took a “heroic-romantic populist line” rather than praising the bai (feudal lords). After 1917 Dzhambul’s public image underwent a transformation. While new themes entered his songs (kolkhoz life in collectivized Kazakh villages, the political life of the country), he also took on official functions (deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Kazakh SSR, member of the Union of Soviet Writers, etc.). In 1938 Dzhambul received the Order of Lenin, to be followed in 1941 by the Stalin Prize. He died in 1945, some months before his 100th birthday. 18 The official accounts of Dzhambul’s life, however, involve circumstances which complicate the interpretation of his persona. The bard is presented as an illiterate person who knew no Russian.19 These are traits hardly compatible with the minute political correctness of his works on (given) topical themes on the one hand, and with instances of a peculiar logocentrism on the other. In his eulogy to Ezhov, head of the NKVD, composed to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this institution, the author, for example, demonstrates basic knowledge in science (“bacilli of cholera”), as well as a deep understanding of the peripeteias of internal party struggle (“Trotskyite bands of spies, /Bukharinists, sly snakes of the swamps”):

Listen: in the night the villains come creeping, They come creeping along the gully, bringing with them, these Monsters, revolvers and bombs, bacilli of cholera... But you meet them, Ezhov, strong and severe, Tried in the flame of battle. These enemies of our life, these enemies of millions – The Trostkyite bands of spies crept to ward us, The Bukharinists, sly snakes of the swamps,

17. For an overview of the traditional forms of Kazakh folklore and how it was appropriated by the Soviet authorities for ideological purposes in the internal Kazakh context (“folklorism from above”), see Kendirbaeva 1994. 18. For official accounts of Dzhambul’s life and career, see the Soviet Short Literary Encyclopaedia (Kratkaia literaturnaia ėnciklopediia 1964: 638–639), which devotes as much space to him as to Derzhavin, Russia’s most prominent poet prior to Pushkin, and Zelinskii’s critical-biographical study (1955). The canonical image of the akyn was also promoted by Efim Dzigan’s picture Dzhambul, released by Kazakhfil’m in 1952. 19. This is the version reproduced in Shostakovich 1979; another source maintains that Dzhambul from the very beginning “put on a mask of absolute ignorance of Russian language and total analphabetism with reference to Kazakh” (Snitkovskii 1997).



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The embittered rabble of nationalists. (Dzhabaev 1937a)

A logocentric stance is perceived in Dzhambul’s New Year’s greeting entitled “The Soviet Union,” published in Pravda on 30 December 1937: “I say: ‘USSR’ – and the blue color of the lakes is glittering, /carpets of aromatic weeds are stretching out in the diamond-like dew at sunrise” (Dzhabaev 1937c). An even more pronounced example of logocentrism is found in a poem entitled “I Sing a Song in the Radiant Kremlin,” written when Dzhambul was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1938 and published in Pravda as well.20 The poem is directed to Mikhail Kalinin (nominal head of State), from the hands of whom Dzhambul received the order at a ceremony in the Kremlin:

Like a brother I met you again, My dear Kalinin, so loved by the people! Kaganovich21 sent me a tulpar,22 On the tulpar Dzhambul came galloping to Moscow And sang a song in the radiant Kremlin. May my song fly forth over the land, I receive this gift from my sunny homeland, I press the Order of Lenin to my breast, A sacred gift of my beloved country.

The poet goes on to explicate what his “song” is about:

About Stalin’s word, which does not sink in the ocean, About Stalin’s sunny, wise law,23 In which, behind every letter, lay The dreams and hopes of the peoples of the land, In which, behind every letter, rises The great, immortal Soviet poeple. (Dzhabaev 1938a)

Apart from being an illustrative example of Dzhambulian style, the poem is interesting because it involuntarily suggests its own status of construction. There are traits typical of the genre, such as the use of solar metaphors referring to Stalin, but part of the imagery actually undermines the illusion of illiterate folk poet. Such a person was not likely to build his metaphors on the concept of letters. 20. It is essential that it was Pravda which was chosen as the main outlet for Dzhambul’s texts and texts about him; in that way the corpus of Dzhambul’s work as well as the mythmaking metatext had one and the same highly prestigious source. 21. Lazar’ Kaganovich was People’s Commissar of Transportation. 22. A tulpar is a legendary winged horse. (This note accompanied the original publication.) 23. Stalin’s law (stalinskii zakon) refers to the constitution of 1936 mentioned above, to which several of Dzhambul’s works are devoted, e.g., “The Twelfth of December” (“Live long, Constitution, a realized dream /you are the happiest law on Earth”) (Dzhabaev 1937b) and “Law of Happiness” (Dzhabaev 1938b).

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Translators and “intuitive translation” If works like the ones discussed here did not, or did not entirely, belong to the poetic imagination of Dzhambul, whose voices were heard in them? The problem is not quite as simple as Toury (following Shostakovich) suggests, claiming that “nobody has ever encountered that man’s poems in praise of the regime in anything but Russian [...]” (2005: 14). In fact, there are many editions of Dzhambul’s works in the Kazakh language. The first more comprehensive one is the academic Alma-Ata editon of Dzhambul’s complete works from 1946 (Dzhambul 1946), which includes the bard’s pre-revolutionary oeuvre as well as the rich output of his 1930s and 1940s. In his preface to the book, the Kazakh writer Sabit Mukanov gives an account of the process of recording the texts: after his emergence in 1936 Dzhambul was assigned personal secretaries, well-known Kazakh poets, who followed him constantly and wrote down everything he composed or performed. Succeeding one another, these poets – Abil’da Tazhibaev, Kalkaman Abdykadyrov, Tair Zharokov and Gali Ormanov – created the corpus of written texts by Dzhambul in the Kazakh language. The author of the preface is amazed by the productivity of the akyn, having produced in1937 alone (at the age of 92) 4,500 lines of poetry.24 The work of the Kazakh poets makes up another link in the collective production of texts attributed to Dzhambul Dzhabaev, adding further complexity to the issue. The relationship between the Kazakh texts and the Russian translations still remains to be explored systematically, as does the use of interlinear trots. The Russian image of Dzhambul was also the result of multiple efforts. Most frequent among the names appearing under Dzhambul’s texts in Russian translation were P. Kuznetsov, K. Altaiskii and M. Tarlovskii; here attention will be drawn to the first and last of them.25 Pavel Nikolaevich Kuznetsov (1909–1967) was a journalist for Kazakh Stanskaia Pravda in Alma-Ata and the one who (by his own claim) in 1936 discovered Dzhambul, whom he then started to translate and publish in his newspaper.26 Kuznetsov had already some time prior to his acquintance with Dzhambul translated and successfully published the works of another akyn, Maimbet, who according to 24. I am grateful to Erbol Kurmanbaev for translations from this Kazakh edition and information on its content. 25. For biographical and bibliographical information about Altaiskii, a poet from the town of Syzran’ on the Volga River, but more widely known as a translator from Kazakh, Kalmuck and Belorussian poetry and as a propagandist of Dzhambul, see Bogdanov 2007: 33–34 (note 61). 26. For biographical and bibliographical information about Kuznetsov, see http://imena.pushkinlibrary.kz/litkuz.htm (accessed 25 October 2009). The website provides only the official version of his translation activities, maintaining, for example, that “[a]ccording to specialists on Kazakh poetry, the translations of P. Kuznetsov display a proximity to the original text with reference to its ideas as well as its verse structure, and therefore most exactly and organically express the creative originality of Dzhambul’s poetics.” As for the discovery of Dzhambul there are several versions crediting, among others, the Russian poet Andrei Aldan-Semenov and the Kazakh poet Abil’da Tazhibaev.



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several sources was a figure totally of his own invention (Zhovtis 1995: 13–14; Brusilovskii 2007).27 This, however, did not prevent the appearance of Maimbet’s works in the central press as well, most notably in Pravda, where a poem in Kuznetsov’s translation in 1935 was even accompanied by a photo of the akyn. There seems, in fact, to be a connection between these publications and the subsequent emergence of Dzhambul. In the spring of 1936, preparations were underway for the first festival of Kazakh culture to be held in Moscow in mid-May. The colorful figure of Maimbet was expected by the local party organization to join the Kazakh delegation but was nowhere to be found. Dzhambul, an old akyn of local fame and proper appearance, seems to have been the solution to the problem (Brusilovskii 2007). Kuznetsov was the principal translator of Dzhambul’s works until 1941, when he left for the front. He was replaced by Tarlovskii, who translated most of Dzhambul’s poems on war themes. Mark Arievich Tarlovskii (1902–1952) had already made a name for himself as a poet, who encountered increasing difficulties with the censors due to his classicist style and “non-proletarian outlook” when he became involved in the work of the Department for translation from the languages of the nationalities of the USSR, founded at the beginning of the 1930s within the State Publishing House for Literature.28 Apart from contemporary literature of the national republics, Tarlovskii translated Eastern classics (the Central Asian poets Navoi and Makhtumkuli, oral epic works), as well as European literature (Victor Hugo, Pierre Jean de Béranger, and Heinrich Heine, among others). His most famous translation is Dzhambul’s “Leningraders, My Children,” dedicated to the people of the besieged city, which became a textbook piece in Soviet schools. Not only did Tarlovskii have extensive experience in translating via interlinear trots, he also devoted considerable reflection to the phenomenon. In 1940 the recently founded journal Friendship of the Peoples (Druzhba narodov) published his article “Literary Translation and Its Portfolio/Briefcase” (Khudozhestvennyi perevod i ego portfel’). Here, Tarlovskii scrutinizes from a theoretical perspective the problem of “intuitive translation,” which is his own term for cases in which the translator does not know the language of the source text and therefore is reduced to using interlinear trots (podstrochniki). Although this method “could not be advocated in principle,” the fact that intuitive translation has become so “enormously widespread” is in itself gratifying as it testifies to “the mighty striving of the national cultures of the Soviet people for mutual rapproachment and familiarization,” which must not be delayed by a temporary

27. Evgenii Brusilovskii, a Russian composer living from the 1930s in Alma-Ata, was presumably Shostakovich’s source of information on Dzhambul; parts of his memoirs have been published, e.g., in the Kazakhstan newspaper Svoboda slova (appearing in Russian). 28. A distinctive feature of Tarlovskii’s talent as original poet was “a universal faculty for imitation, that is an ability for making characteristic traits and elements of others’ creative manners, styles and poetics his own.” (Perel’muter 2003: 30; italics in the original). This quality also made him, as translator, well equipped to stylize any author.

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lack of language competence (Tarlovskii 1940: 265). There is reason, however, to criticize the extreme simplification of the notion of podstrochnik in current practice: Providing the translator with necessary material was often reduced to a rough retelling of the content of the original. The beautiful butterfly, by way of a reversed metamorphosis, turned into a disgusting caterpillar. (Tarlovskii 1940: 265)

Tarlovskii’s solution to the problem is the portfel’ perevoda of the article’s title, a “translation portfolio/briefcase,” which ideally should accompany every commission to translate a work of literature. The portfel’ is a set of aids capable of raising standards in “intuitive translation,” specified by Tarlovskii as: (1) a “language manual” (a description of the source language); such as the alphabet, morphology, versification (for poems), etc.; (2) dictionaries in each direction; (3) the original text plus a transcription with marked stress and indication of rhyme, stanzas, alliteration, etc.; (4) a characterization of the author and his work; (5) two interlinear trots: one as exact as possible, even if not fully intelligible, the other intelligible but not necessarily exact; and (6) commentaries on realia and phraseology, puns, names, etc.29 Tarlovskii argues with particular emphasis for the right of the “intuitive translator” to have access to the source text, the implication being that this was not often the case. Here he refers to the original’s significance as a kind of mystical inspiration, a “mighty but also enigmatic generator of emotions” (1940: 270). In this connection attention is also paid to the phenomenon of pseudo-translation. After considering historical examples, such as Macpherson’s Ossian and Pushkin’s play with fictitious originals, Tarlovskii provides something that amounts to a typology of manipulative practices. Although he hastily declares that “in our Soviet reality, where the moral copyright constitutes one of the most fundamental civil rights, the prerequisites for literary mystifications are irrevocably gone” (1940: 269), several of his examples are obviously related to contemporary practices. He notes, for example, the absence of source texts to a number of popular songs “even by such a great ashug as Suleiman Stal’skii” (1940: 270). In another example he hints at the existence of the Dzhambul industry: “In the practice of translation from the Kazakh a case is known when the translator overestimated his intuitive gifts and forced the tulpar (horse) to gallop at the required moments” (1940: 275). Tarlovskii’s article touches on many of the problems discussed at the time within the framework of the Writer’s Union, both in the Section of Translators and in the Committee for the literature of the peoples of the USSR. It was first presented as a paper at a meeting of the Bureau of National Committees, and its main points are in fact 29. There is a striking similarity between Tarlovskii’s virtual briefcase and the crocodile portfel’ with Stalin’s poems which Arsenii Tarkovskii was to bring home from the Central Committee a decade later. There appears to have been at least some very attentive readers of Friendship of the Peoples. The extent to which the highest Party bodies (notably its Politburo) were engaged in the details of cultural life in the 1930s and 1940s is illustrated in Clark & Dobrenko 2007.



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reflected in the Bureau’s 1940 resolution entitled “On the Regulation of Literary Translations from the Languages of the Peoples of the USSR.” Stating the principal importance of language competence among the translators, the resolution admits of interlinear trots to be tolerated as a temporary means to meet the encreasing demand for translations from national literatures. The quality of such translation is to be guaranteed by a specification more or less identical with Tarlovskii’s “portfolio/briefcase,” but with two additional paragraphs, both of which focus on the question of responsibility: “The interlinear trot cannot and may not be anonymous. The existence of a signature from the author (or authors) of the interlinear trots is a condition, without which the interlinear trots cannot be accepted for work [...] Since the making of interlinear trots is a serious and responsible work [...] the Board of each writers’ organization in the republics and regions is obliged to register the staff of authors of interlinear trots [...]. It is inadmissible to entrust the task of making interlinear trots to random people unable to bear responsibility for the work they have been assigned.”30 The attention paid to the issue within the literary institutions suggests that the uncontrolled translation from national languages, whatever the sources were, was of such proportions that it was perceived as an administrative problem. Although the authenticity of Dzhambul’s original texts was never officially questioned, the quality of the translations and the interlinear trots was subject to detailed discussions within the Bureau of National Committees, and the work of some of the early translators, notably Altaiskii, was deemed inferior.

Stretching the space in between Given the existence of a certain Soviet translation machine and “the purposeful fuss around Dzhambul” and others, isn’t there a need for a reinterpretation of the Bakhtinian perspective as outlined in the beginning of this article? Is it relevant at all? If the translation is fictitious, it could be argued, then we are in practice dealing with a “onevoiced” text. Such a view, however, would be an oversimplification. First, to postulate that a text is a translation is to create the illusion of double-voicedness, which is indispensable for the construction of a legitimate speech subject, or position, from which the utterance would be valid in the given context. Second, the texts involved in practices like “dzhambulization” are clearly oriented toward a specific type of source text, albeit fictitious. The “original” in this case constitutes a set of conventions, a horizon of expectations, some general presuppositions about characteristic traits in the foreign culture, in part mirroring what has been labeled “Stalinist Orientalism” (Brandenberger 2002: 93). This “second voice” may be more dominant here than in a genuine translation, since, as Toury remarks, “fictitious translations often represent their fictitious sources in a rather exaggerated manner” (2005: 7). 30. The Russian Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), fond 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 475, list 58–59.

 Susanna Witt

The manipulations of the “space in between” made possible by the extensive use of interlinear trots in Soviet translation practices is a field of research as yet undeveloped. It is clear, though, that the concept of culture planning “from above” needs some further elaboration. Apparently, such planning was not necessarily initiated by official organs at the level of concrete action. “From above” the state established a framework and created a demand for translated texts of a certain type. Such a demand arose, as shown above, in connection with the festivals featuring the literature and art of the peoples of national republics (the so-called dekady, literally ‘ten days’) that were organized regularly in Moscow from 1936 until 1941. Aleksandr Zhovtis has described one of these events from the point of view of translation: In Moscow preparations were going on for the regular dekada of Kazakh literture and art. Like flies around honey the fellow-translators were gathering around hastily prepared editions. Hurriedly interlinear trots were produced, hurriedly they were rhymed by people who had never seen a line of Kazakh poetry before, and in the pre-holiday turmoil the manuscripts were submitted to type-setting. (Zhovtis 1995: 122–123) 31

In the Soviet Russian literary system a niche was created, open for different kinds of initiatives “from below,” all of which, however, were obliged to fulfil the same ideological commision “from above.” The range of such initiatives was very wide. In addition translation from totally fictitious source texts, cases have been reported in which the interlinear trots virtually turned into an original genre. Here, original texts in the source language would be produced after their “translation” into Russian, a practice which prompts a new paradoxical term: the “secondary original.” The author of “original interlinear trots” could be either the alleged author of the source text (Lipkin 1997: 454–455; Friedberg 1997: 183) or the translator himself (Perel’muter 2003: 48). Under such circumstances the translation process could take the shape of a spiral: from “original interlinear trots” a translation was produced, from which subsequently a “secondary original” was produced in some national language, which, in its turn, could be retranslated into Russian, and so on. The economic incentive for this kind of operation was significant (Vitkovskii 1998: 14). Needless to say, such a widening of the field of anonymous co-authorship rendered the distribution of “responsibility for the word” even less transparent. A similar process may be assumed for parts of the Dzhambul production as a collective enterprise: Russian translators (presumably closer to the conjunctures in political disourse) may have provided the minutely calibrated ideological content as an “original interlinear trot,” while the Kazakh poets may have contributed their expertise in Kazakh folk versification, forging this very content into a “secondary original” in Dzhambul’s favored traditional metre, the zhir. 31. For an account of the 1940 dekada of Kirgiz art and literature, see Lipkin 1997: 467–469. On the role of the dekady in “the economy of the gift,” see Brooks 2000: 96.



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Genuine translation from existing source texts in principle provided pragmatic possibilities similar to the ones discussed here. In conclusion, we will examine a case of culture planning “from below,” displaying how one such translator, Boris Pasternak, was able to pursue his own ideological and artistic goals by stretching the space in between. From the 1930s on, Pasternak, due to difficulties in publishing his own work, turned to translation from European literature as well as from the literature of the peoples of USSR (see Pasternak 2005). In 1939 Pasternak translated Hamlet on commission from director Vsevolod Meierkhol’d. After Meierkhol’d’s arrest in the summer the translation was accepted for a stage production at the Art Theater (MKhAT) in Moscow (which was never to premiere). It was subsequently published in the journal Molodaia Gvardiia (Shekspir 1940) and prefaced by the translator himself. Here Pasternak declares his own translation principles, his predilection for “free translation” (vol’nyi perevod) as opposed to “literalism” (bukvalizm). As noted by Friedberg, such a position was in fact consonant with the official dogmas of Socialist Realism, which denounced “elitist” literalism in translation as a manifestation of “formalism” and, later on, even “cosmopolitism” (1997: 16; 83–84).32 Apart from habitual xenophobia, one reason for the official standpoint was, as Friedberg suggests, that “free” translation justified and facilitated censorship and ideologically motivated modifications of the source texts. Therefore, Pasternak’s translation principles, on the one hand, could be regarded as an adaptation to prevalent norms, while, on the other, provided him with a unique space of artistic liberty. In the case of Hamlet the creative space of “free translation” was used for a reaccentuation of the source text which I have analyzed elsewhere (Witt 2003), one result of which was the imprint on this translation of the operative language of a state machine very different from that of Elizabethan England. Pasternak’s translation of Faust, produced thirteen years later, shows that Hamlet was not an isolated instance in the poet’s translation practice. In the second part of Goethe’s tragedy there is mention of a project with a sinister ring for the Soviet ear: the building of a canal accompanied by the use of brutal force. In his very free rendering of this passage (Baucis’ lines), Pasternak by way of reaccentuation questions the justification for such enterprises and at the same time encodes the name of the architect responsible for the notorious canal-building projects of his own time:33

Menschenopfer mußten bluten, Nachts erscholl des Jammers Qual; Meerab flossen Feuergluten, Morgens war es ein Kanal.

32. The official position was not wholly consistent in practice: simultaneously with Pasternak’s “free” translations from Shakespeare, the translations of Mikhail Lozinskii, which tended towards “literalism,” reached canonical status. On the existence of two parallel canonical translations of Hamlet in Russia, both in the 19th and 20th century, see Semenenko 2007: 100–102. 33. This observation was made by Christopher Barnes (1989: 284).

 Susanna Witt



Gottlos ist er, ihn gelüstet Unsre Hütte, unser Hain; Wie er sich als Nachbar brüstet, Soll man untertänig sein. (Goethe 1983: 396) [Chelovecheskie zhertvy Okupaet li kanal? On bezbozhnik, inzhener tvoi, I kakuiu silu vzial! Stali nuzhny do zarezu Dom emu i nasha vys’. On bez serdtsa, iz zheleza, Skazhet, i khot’ v grob lozhis’. (Gete 1953: 535)]

[Are human sacrifices Justified by a canal? He is an atheist, your engineer, And what power he has gained! He desperately needed Our house and heights. He is without heart, made from iron One word from him and you would lay down in your coffin.34]

The translation strategy applied by Pasternak should be viewed against the background of certain Soviet practices. Stalin had already “encoded” himself in the real project of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, one of his most prestigious undertakings. Built in 1931– 32, largely by penal labor and with great loss of life, it officially bore his name until 1961 (“Belomorsko-baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina”).35 Moreover, the translation also connects to the poetics of the Oriental Stalin panegyric, which often made use of the word form stali (preterite tense of the verb “become,” “start to”), presumably both because of its iconic qualities (as a sign for the Leader) and, rhetorically, as an index of progressive change: things were bad (before the revolution), but now they have become (stali) good. A graphic example is found in Kuznetsov’s translation of akyn Orumbai’s poem “Dombra,” published in Pravda on 18 May 1936, in which the elements “stali” and “Stalin” even make up a rhyme: “Pri tebe, liubimyi Stalin, [...] 34. Lines 1–6 are Barnes’ translation. Pasternak’s Faust was submitted to type-setting 31 March 1953, that is less than a month after Stalin’s death. 35. The project also entered the history of Soviet literature. In August 1933 a group of writers left for a sailing trip though the canal, the result of which was a volume describing its construction. The publication of this collective work, just before the 17th Party congress (to which it was dedicated) “was the first major submission of Soviet literature to Stalinism” (Kemp-Welch 1991: 160).



Between the lines 

Dombry pet’ svobodno stali” (“Under your rule, beloved Stalin, [...] the dombras have started to sing freely”). Pasternak’s reaccentuation of Goethe’s text, however, goes beyond the anagrammatic play with the Leader’s name. The words “He is heartless, made of iron” do not have any counterpart in the source text; at the same time the attribute (“of iron”) was used (as an adjective) in Soviet public discourse with reference to several of the leading officials, most notably the people’s commissars Ezhov and Kaganovich (zheleznyi komissar). It is also closely linked to the name of Stalin himself, meaning ‘made of steel,’ a semantic potential which was widely exploited in the political rhetoric of the time, as well as in literature.36 In a peculiar way, Pasternak’s translation here inscribes itself in a tradition of works devoted to the theme of “the Leader and his projects” (represented by Dzhambul and others), while at the same time negating the prerequisites of it (the implicit value of these projects). “Culture planning from below” turns out to be intimately intertwined with “culture planning from above.”

Conclusion Literary translation in the Soviet Union may well be the largest more or less coherent project of translation the world has seen to date – largest in terms of geographical range, number of languages (and directions) involved and timespan; coherent in the sense of ideological framework (given its fluctuations over time) and centralized planning. The history of this project, still basically unwritten, prompts new questions both in the study of the culture of the totalitarian epoch and in the field of translation studies. If approached from the point of view of translations, in which, due to their doublevoicedness, a “principle of uncertainty” is installed from the very beginning, this culture may appear as more complex and dynamic than we are used to think. Crystallizing crucial questions concerning the relationship between “the foreign” and “one’s own” in the specific context of Soviet culture, translation provides an interesting case both as practice and as object of discourse. The procedures implied in the production

36. Cf. Nikolai Aseev’s poem “Of Stalin’s forging...,” published in Pravda on 23 February1934. A Pravda editorial of 20 September 1936 was headed “Pilots of Stalin’s forging.” Suleiman Stal’skii (or rather his translator Effendi Kapiev) elaborated on his own name in a similar vein in a poem celebrating 1 May 1935 (also published in Pravda): “Stal’-Suleiman is endlessly happy [...]”. Occasionally, Pasternak himself could crack a joke in the same genre. In 1954, sending his cousin Ol’ga Freidenberg a copy of the journal Znamia with the publication of ten poems from Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak comments on them: “I send you for fun: some interesting pages where there is no trace of laziness (leni) and steel (stali)” (Pasternak 1981: 320). The expression alludes to Ol’ga’s pun in a previous letter about a “pantheon of laziness and steel” (panteon leni i stali; at the time the Lenin mausoleum also hosted Stalin’s corpse).

 Susanna Witt

and editing of translations assume particular significance in the Stalin era of “textual anxiety” (Clark and Dobrenko 2007: xiii). To the field of translation studies the Soviet case generally provides rich material for the discussion of topical matters linked to issues of “translation and power,” “translation and ideology,” “translation and empire,” etc. In particular, Soviet practices developed within the field of indirect translation, producing such paradoxical entities as “original interlinear trots” and “secondary originals,” supplies new perspectives on such key concepts as source language, target language, authenticity, and translational agency.

Works cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 60–102. Austin: University of Texas Press. –—. 1996. “Problema rechevykh zhanrov.” In Sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 5, 159–206. Moscow: Russkie slovari. Barnes, Christopher. 1989. Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, Vol. 2, 1928–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Blium, Arlen. 2000. Sovetskaia tsenzura v ėpokhu total’nogo terrora 1929–1953. St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt. Bogdanov, Konstantin. 2007. “Pravo na son i uslovnye refleksii: kolybel’nye pesni v sovetskoi kul’ture (1930–1950-e gody).” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 86: 7–46. Brandenberger, David. 2002. National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: Harvard UP. Brooks, Jeffrey. 2000. Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Brusilovskii, Evgenii. 2007. “Brusilovskii o Dzhambule.” Svoboda slova 26: 5–7. Cavanagh, Clare. 1996. “The Death of the Book à la russe: The Acmeists under Stalin.” Slavic Review 55.1: 125–135. Calzada Perez, Maria (ed). 2003. Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology – Ideologies in Translation Studies. Manchester and Northhampton, Mass: St. Jerome. Clark, Katerina and Dobrenko, Evgeny. 2007. Soviet Culture and Power. A History in Documents, 1917–1953. New Haven/London: Yale UP. Dzhabaev, Dzhambul. 1936 “Velikii stalinskii zakon.” Trans. P. Kuznetsov. Pravda 15.6: 2. –—. 1937a .“Narkom Ezhov.” Trans. K. Altaiskii. Pravda 3.12: 2. –—. 1937b. “Dvenadtsatoe dekabria.” Trans. K Altaiskii. Pravda 12.12: 5. –—. 1937c. “Sovetskii Soiuz.” Trans. K Altaiskii. Pravda 30.12: 2. –—. 1938a. “Ia pesniu poiu v luchezarnom Kremle.” [No translator indicated] Pravda 3.12: 4. –—. 1938b. “Zakon schast’ia .” [No translator indicated] Pravda 5.12: 1. –—. 1946. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Alma-Ata: Kazakhskoe ob’’edinennoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 2002. “Culture Planning and Cultural Resistance in the Making and Maintaining of Entities.” Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 14 (April): 45–52.



Between the lines  Fleishman, Lazar. 1990. Boris Pasternak. The Poet and His Politics. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP. Fleishman, Lazar’. 2005. Boris Pasternak i literaturnoe dvizhenie 1930-kh godov. St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt. Friedberg, Maurice. 1997. Literary Translation in Russia. A Cultural History. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State UP. Gasparov, Michail. 2001. “Podstrochnik i mera tochnosti.” In O russkoi poėzii, Analizy. Interpretatsii. Kharakteristiki, 363–372. Moscow: Azbuka. Gete, Iogann Vol’fgang. 1953. Faust. Perevod B. Pasternaka. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1983. Faust I/II. Urfaust. Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag. Gorham, Michael. 2003. Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois UP. Grenoble, Lenore A. 2003. Language Policy in the Soviet Union. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Hermans, Theo. 1996. “The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative.” Target 8.1: 23–48. Jones, Derek (ed). 2001. Censorship. A World Encyclopedia. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Kemp-Welch, A. 1991. Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–39. London: Macmillan. Kendirbaeva, Gulnar. 1994. “Folklore and Folklorism in Kazakhstan.” Asian Folklore Studies 53: 97–123. Kratkaia literaturnaia ėntsiklopediia. 1964. Vol. 2. Moscow: Sovetskaia ėntsiklopediia. Leighton, Lauren G. 1991. Two Worlds, One Art. Literary Translation in Russia and America, DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois UP. Levanskii, Vladimir. 1998. “Belaia kobyla, voronoi zherebets i stalinskie podstrochniki.” Available online at: (accessed 22 June 2008). Lipkin, Semen. 1997. “Stalin, Bukharin i ‘Manas.’” In Kvadriga. Povest’. Memuary, 442–486. Moscow: Knizhnyi sad/Agraf. Mandelshtam, Osip. 1990. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, edited by P.M. Nerler. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Pasternak, Boris. 1981. Perepiska s Ol’goi Freidenberg, edited by Elliott Mossman. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. –—. 2005. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii s priolozheniiami v 11 tomakh. Vol. 6, edited by E. V. Pasternak and A. Iu. Sergeeva-Kliatis. Moscow: Slovo. Perel’muter, Vadim. 2003. “Torzhestvennaia pesn’ skvortsa, oda, stavshaia satiroi.” Voprosy literatury 6: 27–50. Semenenko, Aleksei. 2007. Hamlet the Sign: Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation [Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 39]. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Shakhova, Ėrna. 1993. “Rol’ redaktora v izdanii knigi.” In Översättning som kulturöverföring: Rysk-svenska och svensk-ryska översättningsproblem, edited by Barbara Lönnqvist, 131–145. Åbo: Åbo Akademi UP. Shekspir, Vil’iam. 1940. “Gamlet, prints datskii. Perevod s angliiskogo B. Pasternaka.” Molodaia gvardiia 5/6: 15–131. Shomrakova, I. 1967. “Knigoizdatel’stvo ‘Vsemirnaia literatura’ (1918–1924).” In Kniga. Issledovaniia i materialy, Sbornik XIV, 175–193. Moscow: Kniga. Shostakovich, Dmitri. 1979. Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. London: Hamish Hamilton.

 Susanna Witt Smith, Michael G. 1998. Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR,1917–1953. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Snitkovskii, Viktor. 1997. “Vsadnik na belom kone.” Forum. Literaturno-kriticheskii zhurnal 31. Available online: (accessed 22 August 2008). Tarkovskii, Arsenii. 1991–1993. Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, edited by T. Ozerskaia-Tarkovskaia. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Tarlovskii, Mark. 1940. “Khudozhestvennyi perevod i ego portfel’.” Druzhba narodov 4: 263–284. Toper, Pavel. 2000. Perevod v sisteme sravnitel’nogo literaturovedeniia. Moscow: Nasledie. Toury, Gideon. 2005. “Enhancing Cultural Changes by Means of Fictitious Translations.” In Translation and Cultural Change: Studies in History, Norms and Image-projection, edited by Eva Hung, 3–17. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tymoczko, Maria and Gentzler, Edwin (eds). 2002. Translation and Power. Amherst/Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Vitkovskii, Evgenii. 1998. “Russkoe zazerkal’e.” In Strofy veka-2. Antologiia mirovoi poėzii v russkikh perevodakh XX veka, edited by Evgenii Vitkovskii, 8–22. Moscow: Polifakt. Witt, Susanna. 2003. “Perevod kak mimikriia: Gamlet Pasternaka.” Swedish Contributions to the Thirteenth International Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana, 15–-21 August, edited by B. Englund Dimitrova and A. Pereswetoff-Morath, 145–156. Lund: Lund University. –—. (forthcoming). “Totalitarizm i perevod: kontekst Dzhambula.” In Dzhambul Dzhabaev. Prikliucheniia kazakhskogo akyna v sovetskoi kul’ture, edited by K. Bogdanov and R. Nicolosi. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Zelinskii, Kornelii. 1955. Dzhambul: Kritiko-biograficheskii ocherk. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’. Zhovtis, Aleskandr. 1995. Nepridumannye anektdoty. Iz sovetskogo proshlogo. Moscow: ITs-Garant.

Translation theory and cold war politics Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov in 1950s America Brian James Baer

Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA This chapter explores the relationship between politics and translation theory in the evolution of the theoretical positions of two of the most influential “agents of translation” in the postwar years, Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov. Within the rarefied atmosphere of Cold War America, the author traces the polarization of the translation positions of these men, exiles from Soviet Russia, who both engaged in literary translation and contemplated translation as a phenomenon. This polarization played itself out in the context of a proposed joint translation project of the Russia Medieval epic Slovo o polku Igoreve [The Lay of Igor’s Campaign], the authenticity of which was something of a cause célèbre in émigré circles of the time. The relationship between these two enormously talented individuals raises important questions regarding translation and politics, translation and exile, the agency of the translator, the connection of theory to history, and the very identity of the literary text, which are still relevant today.

Introduction In his collection of anecdotes of Russian cultural figures of the twentieth century, Sergei Dovlatov recounts an incident, later confirmed by Brian Boyd in his biography of Vladimir Nabokov, which occurred while Roman Jakobson was teaching in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in the late 1950s. Pressured by colleagues to offer an academic appointment to Nabokov on the grounds that, after the success of Lolita, he was “big,” Jakobson supposedly replied to the effect that an elephant is also big, but no one would suggest that an elephant chair the department of zoology. The anecdote reflects a growing rift between these two men, arguably the most famous Russian émigrés in America in the two decades following the end of the Second World War, which would culminate with Nabokov’s withdrawal from a

 Brian James Baer

joint translation project of the medieval Russian tale, Slovo o polku Igoreve [Lay of Igor’s Campaign]. Although far less acrimonious and public than the quarrel between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson that took place in the 1960s in the wake of the publication of Nabokov’s controversial translation of Eugene Onegin – unlike Nabokov and White, Nabokov and Jakobson were never close friends – the rift between the two Russian cultural figures was to some extent reflected in the evolution of their approaches to translation. Although both men were involved in the theory and practice of translation throughout their adult careers, their positions on translation were given their most famous articulation in two essays published in the 1950s, both of which have been anthologized in Lawrence Venuti’s Translation Studies Reader: “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959) and Nabokov’s “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English” (1955). These essays, along with their work as translators, editors, and critics in the post-war period, made Jakobson and Nabokov extremely influential “agents of translation,” defined by Juan Sager as people who are “in an intermediary position between a translator and an end user of a translation” (Sager 1994: 321, qtd in Milton and Bandia 2009: 1) and “devote great amounts of energy and even their own lives to the cause of a foreign literature, author or literary school, translating, writing articles, teaching and [dedicating themselves to] the dissemination of knowledge and culture” (Milton and Bandia 2009: 1). One of the most obvious effects of anthologization is, of course, to situate these texts within a, conceptual framework single which can be described in general terms as the history of translation theory, or, somewhat anachronistically, of Translation Studies.1 Venuti notes that Jakobson and Nabokov’s opinions, along with those of other theorists of the 1940s-1950s, were “shaped by disciplinary trends and vary widely, ranging between the extremes of philosophical skepticism and practical optimism” (2000: 67). Within that disciplinary framework, other interpretive contexts, be they biographical, historical, or creative, are effectively ignored or marginalized. This chapter explores the complex personal and professional relationship of these two important agents of translation to reveal the subtext shaping their respective theoretical positions. That subtext is informed in part by these authors’ personal biographies, in part by their creative or artistic practices, and in part by the rarefied political and artistic climate of the Cold War.

Biographical background Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov were near contemporaries and both received the kind of education that prepared them well to be the influential cultural figures they would both become. Jakobson was born in Moscow in 1896 to a chemical engineer and prominent industrialist and studied at the famous Lazarev Institute of Oriental 1.

The term was in fact coined by James Holmes in the 1970s. See Holmes 1972.



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Languages. After completing his studies there he went on to study in the Slavic section of the Philological Faculty of Moscow University. During this time, he spent a semester in Saint Petersburg, studying Sanskrit under A.A. Shakhmatov. He received his M.A. in 1918. Always precocious, Jakobson founded in 1915 the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which was dedicated to the study of poetic language. He would also co-found the St. Petersburg group, OPOIAZ (Organization for the Study of Poetic Language), and later, with Vilem Mukařovsky, the Prague Linguistic Circle. He also established contacts with avant-garde literary and artistic circles everywhere he went. Jakobson was never restricted by traditional disciplinary boundaries and his scholarly curiosity strayed into a number of disciplines, ranging from anthropology to cognitive science. Despite the wide range of his interests, one common feature of his scholarly work was his treatment of language as a functional system (Pomorska 1985: 207). In the course of his studies and his later peregrinations, he acquired proficiency in a prodigious number of languages. As Joseph Frank commented: “Jakobson was of course a formidable polyglot, who published first in his native Russian and could shift easily into French, German, and Czech, among other languages, as the occasion required. Tsvetan Todorov, who first heard him lecture in Bulgarian, and then came to know him well, has estimated that he could command about twenty languages – all of the Slavic group, all of the Romance group, and most of the Germanic family” (Frank 1990: 3). This proficiency – combined with a profound interest in comparative linguistics – made it perhaps inevitable that Jakobson would engage in translation throughout his scholarly and artistic career. He would translate the avant-garde poems of his friend, the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and would later leave the USSR in 1922 for Prague, where he worked as a translator with an official Soviet mission to the Red Cross. He continued his studies at the Charles University in Prague and received his doctorate in 1937. He later emigrated to the United States, working first at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York, alongside Claude Levi-Strauss, then at Columbia University, where he occupied the Thomas Masaryk chair in Czechoslovak Studies, and finally at Harvard University, where he eventually held a joint appointment in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Linguistics until his death in 1982. Vladimir Nabokov was born only three years after Jakobson in1899. Thanks to the author’s autobiographical writings, much is known of the artistocratic St. Petersburg world in which the author grew up. He was raised to be bilingual in Russian and English, and he began to study French at the age of five. He attended school at the progressive Tenishev Gymnasium in the pre-revolutionary capital, and when his family emigrated in 1919, Vladimir entered Cambridge University. There he earned a degree in Slavic and Romance literatures. During his many years in emigration he would live in Berlin, Paris, the United States and Switzerland. He never returned to Russia. Nabokov’s mastery of languages and his need to earn money after his family’s emigration made it almost inevitable that he, too, like so many of his compatriots, would try his hand at translation. While in the United States, and before the enormous success of Lolita, he would earn his living largely as a university professor at Wellesley

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College and then at Cornell University. His most well-known translations into English – other than the translation of his own fiction – are those that were originally undertaken as study aids for his students: Eugene Onegin and The Song of Igor’s Campaign. He also translated poetry into Russian and his own fictional work into both Russian and English.

Theoretical positions Jakobson’s essay of 1959 has been anthologized numerous times and is often discussed in relationship to Jakobson’s interest in semiotics. In this essay, Jakobson challenges the empiricist notion that conceives of meaning in reference to an objective reality outside of language. Meaning, Jakobson argues, occurs within a potentially endless chain of signs. Meaning, therefore, is not a coding of reality but always a recoding from one set of signs into another. Jakobson writes, “Mere pointing will not teach us whether ‘cheese’ is the name of the given specimen, or of any box of camembert, or of camembert in general or of any cheese, any milk product, any food, any refreshment, or perhaps any box irrespective of contents” (Jakobson 2000: 113). Then, in what has become a standard feature of translation theory, he offers a tri-partite schema in which he elaborates three possible types of semiotic recoding: (1) intralingual, which is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language (rewording or paraphrase); (2) interlingual, which is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language; and (3) intersemiotic, which is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. If meaning is produced through acts of recoding, then complete semantic equivalence, Jakobson suggests, is impossible. What we can achieve is some form of synonymy or, as Jakobson puts it, “equivalence in difference.” However, Jakobson cautions that this need not and should not reinforce what he refers to as the “dogma of untranslatability” (115). Even differences in grammatical categories between two languages are not an unsurmountable obstacle for “languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” (116). He then proposes an approach to translation similar to what Peter Newmark described as communicative translation, that is, the recoding of messages not individual words with the aim of functional not semantic equivalence. Jakobson advocates a similar approach in his forward to the 1948 translation of the Russian medieval tale Slovo o polku igoreve [Lay of Igor’s Campaign] into French: One could not achieve exactness in a translation by seeking to reproduce the original literally, word for word; often a single word can only be adequately rendered by a group of words and vice versa. And in translation from Old Russian into modern Russian one forgets out of habit that very often linguistic units are not equivalent in the two idioms. Obviously one cannot translate set phrases from a



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given language word for word and one can only smile at the unfortunate translator who, instead of rendering the idiom ‘s grekhom popolam’ [with sin by halves] with the semantic equivalent ‘tant bien que mal’ [just barely] gave us ‘de moitié avec le peché’ or ‘halves in sin.’ (Jakobson 1948: 31, translation mine)

Here Jakobson makes the point that when translating collocations and fixed expressions, the unit of translation must not be the individual word but the entire phrase. However, in the second part of his essay “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” Jakobson acknowledges some major “impediments” to translatability. The first concerns connotational meanings that may accrue to grammatical categories: “...in jest, in dreams, in magic, briefly, in what one would call everyday verbal mythology and in poetry above all, the grammatical categories carry a high semantic import. In these conditions, the question of translation becomes much more entangled and controversial” (Jakobson 2000: 117). The category of grammatical gender, for example, produces certain inevitable associations in the mind of the native speaker. In Russian death is imagined as a woman and in German as a of the influence of the grammatical gender of these words. Such symbolic associations man due to, Jakobson asserts, can reduce translators “to despair” (117). Jakobson reiterates the near impossibility of translating grammatical categories in his later essay “The Grammar of Poetry and the Poetry of Grammar” (1961). He comments: “During the late 1930s, while editing Puškins’s works in Czech, I was struck by the way in which poems that seemed to approximate closely the Russia text, its images and sound structure, often produced the distressing impression of a complete rift with the original because of the inability or impossibility of reproducing their grammatical structure” (Jakobson 1987: 121). In his essay on the Slovo, he argues that grammatical distinctions that no longer exist in modern Russian, such as the dual and the nominal form of adjectives in epithets, play a key role in the Slovo and should be translated through periphrasis, or paraphrase. The second impediment to translatability is phonemic play or paronomasia, which “reigns over poetic art” (Jakobson 2000: 118) and is one of many linguistic phenomena that, Jakobson maintains, contradict Saussure’s concept of the absolute arbitrariness of signifier and signified (Pomorska 1985: 208). The close connection between sound and meaning in poetry makes it, Jakobson contends, “by definition untranslatable” (Jakobson 2000: 118). At the end of the essay, he advocates “creative transposition” or, if we were to adopt a “cognitive attitude,” explicitation, which would result in the gloss of paronomastic value. And so, while the essay opens with a bravado statement on the possibility of translating any content, it ends on a note of despair regarding the possibility of translating literary and in particular poetic form. The translator, it would seem, has before him what Nabokov described as “a choice between rhyme and reason” (77). In his essay of 1955, “Problems of Translation: ‘Onegin’ in English,” originally published in the Partisan Review, Nabokov advocates literal translation as adamantly as Jakobson denounces word for word translation. Nabokov defines literalism as “absolute accuracy” (Nabokov 2000: 81), which entails the sacrifice of formal properties – such

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as the subtle harmonies of Pushkin’s verse – in order to convey a range of denotative, connotative and expressive meanings through a combination of explicitation and footnotes.2 He argues, that “literal translation” is in fact tautological, “since anything but that is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation or parody” (Nabokov 2000: 77). Having declared “the impossibility of translating EO in verse,” Nabokov then posits the “translator’s ignorance” of language, literature, and culture as the greatest threat to an accurate translation of the work. In the foreward to his translation of Eugene Onegin, Nabokov offers his own tripartite model of translation approaches, which he described as paraphrastic, lexical (or constructional), and literal. The first approach produces “a free version of the original, with omissions and additions prompted by the exigencies of form, the conventions attributed to the consumer, and the translator’s ignorance” (Nabokov 1990: vii), and so he rejects it. The second approach respects the basic meaning of source text lexicon and syntax, but can be done by a machine “under the direction of an intelligent bilinguist” (viii). The third approach, which he declares to be the only true translation, renders, “as closely as the associative an syntactical capacities of another language allows, the exact contextual meaning of the original” (vii). Somewhat paradoxically, Jakobson, the scholar, advocates “creative” solutions to translation problems, while Nabokov, the writer, demands “sacrifice” on the part of the translator. In his introduction to the translation, he writes: “In transposing Eugene Onegin from Pushkin’s Russian into my English I have sacrificed to completeness of meaning every formal element including the iambic rhythm, whenever its retention hindered fidelity. To my ideal of literalism I sacrificed everything (elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar) that the dainty mimic prizes higher than truth” (Nabokov 1990: x, italics mine). He makes a similar remark in the foreward to his translation into English of Slovo o polku igoreve: “In my translation of The Song I have ruthlessly sacrificed manner to matter and have attempted to give a literal rendering of the text as I understand it” (1960: 5, italics mine). And he reiterated the point in the forward to the translation of Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni (A Hero of Our Time) he did in collaboration with his son Dmitri: “The book has been paraphrased into English several times, but never translated before” (1992: 7). He then contrasts the honest translator to “the experienced hack [who] may find it quite easy to turn Lermonotov’s Russian into slick English clichés. . . and [who] will tone down everything that might seem unfamiliar to the meek and imbecile reader visualized by his publisher” (Nabokov ibid.). The honest translator, on the other hand, will “sacrifice to the requirements of exactness a number of important things – good taste, neat diction and even grammar (when some characteristic solecism occurs in the Russian text)” (ibid. italics mine). Nabokov’s categorical position, however, had a long evolution and is in many ways contradicted by his life-long practice of translation. As noted above, the literal approach 2. By “literal translation” Nabokov appears to be referring here to what he will later call “lexical”.



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was not the only one practiced by Nabokov over the length of his career. In his theoretical essays, too, he advocated other approaches to translation, as in the earlier essay, “The Art of Translation” (1941), which he penned while working on a volume of poetic translations from Russian into English, published under the title Three Russian Poets: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev (1944). Nabokov attempted in all the translations in this volume to preserve the rhyme scheme and meter of the original poems. He condemns those translators who – through pride, lack of talent or ignorance – alter the original, for instance, through the commission of obvious errors, omissions, or other textual modifications in order “to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public” (Nabokov 1981: 314). Later in the essay, when discussing the challenge of translating all the phonetic patterns and associations contained in a famous opening line of a Pushkin poem (“Ia pomniu chudnoe mgnovenie”), Nabokov declares: “The first thing I discovered was that the expression ‘a literal translation’ is more or less nonsense” (320). Later, however, while working on the translation of Eugene Onegin, Nabokov would express growing frustration with what he referred to as the “dictatorship” of rhymed translations” (Boyd 1991: 136), an interesting choice of words in the increasingly politicized atmosphere of Cold War America. Although the positions articulated in these articles might appear at first glance to be diametrically opposed, with Jakobson declaring the possibility of translating virtually anything – “languages differ in what they must say, not in what they can say” – and Nabokov insisting on the impossibility of translating poetry as poetry, in particular, the poetry of the great Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, the real difference between these two polylingual polymaths is more of emphasis than of essence. It is true that Jakobson denounced “word for word” translation and maintained that paraphrasis was a legitimate translation strategy, while Nabokov advocated “literal translation” and condemned periphrastic translation. Despite his call for “creative transposition,” however, Jakobson does recognize certain categories of “untranslatability,” while Nabokov fails to follow his own “literal” approach to the letter. Although the two men were polemical by nature, which may have led them to express their views at times in rather categorical terms, they were nonetheless subtle thinkers and nuanced practitioners of the translator’s craft.

Aesthetic positions That difference in emphasis is to some extent a reflection of their deeply held views on the nature and function of language and literature. Jakobson’s emphasis on creativity in translation, his eschewal of word for word translation and his refusal to mourn what is “lost” in translation – the comparatist believed language systems to be too varied to expect perfect equivalence – is evident in his earliest work as a translator. In fact, in his French translation of Vladimir Majakovsky’s “A Cloud in Trousers,” Jakobson added a proper name “Marie” for the sake of rhyme and meter. According to Jakobson,

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Majakovsky, who did not speak French, caught the translator’s intervention: “Wait a minute,’ said Majakovksy, ‘marie, marie, what is that?’ I translated it for him literally. ‘Oh, so they’re different words; that’s good’” (Jakobson 1997: 35). It appears that Jakobson practiced creative transposition from his earliest years as a translator. Jakobson’s views on translation were no doubt influenced by the radical artistic circle in which he traveled. He was a close friend to several prominent Futurist poets and was himself a practioner of zaum, or ‘trans-sense’ poetry. As Joseph Frank notes, “One of the major reasons for Jakobson’s impressive scope, and his openness to the widest cultural perspectives, was his early contact with the explosion of Russian avantgarde art in the first quarter of the present century. Much to the astonishment – and perhaps amusement – of his staider scientific colleagues, the mature Jakobson always attributed the highest importance to his immersion in this bohemian climate when he was a young man” (Frank 1990: 5). Pervading this bohemian climate at the time was a profound cultural iconoclasm; the Futurists attacked what they saw as the essentially bourgeois organization of the literary field around a hierarchical selection of classic authors enjoying canonical status. In their manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912), the Futurists demanded that the classic authors be thrown from “the steamship of modernity.” Majakovksy’s disdain for the “bourgeois” literary canon would be reflected in a view of translation that saw it as a means of producing texts in a horizontal rather than a vertical – or hierarchical – relationship to the original. The radical, bohemian atmosphere of the time encouraged collaborative artistic projects and granted a certain prominence to translation. In fact, Majakovsky often featured translations of his own works at his early Moscow poetry readings and composed the following advertisement for one such literary soirée: “Brilliant translators will read brilliant translations of my brilliant poems” (Jakobson 1997: 286, fn. 108). It is in that context that Jakobson came up with the idea to translate one of Majakovksy’s poems, “Nichego ne ponimaiut” (They don’t understand anything), into Old Church Slavonic, which he read one evening in 1918 at the Cafe of Poets in Moscow.3 The poem recounts a fantastic and bizarre visit to a barbershop and is filled with unusual visual images and sound play. Jakobson’s translation represents an interesting act of recoding, for by dismissing the transparent, denotative function of translation, Jakobson explores what we might call in the spirit of the time “perevod kak takovoi,” (translation as such), or translation as an end in itself.4 By translating the avant-garde poem into Old Church Slavonic, the language of Russian Orthodox Church services, 3. For more on Jakobson’s translation of “Nichego ne ponimaiut”, see Jakobson 1992: 126 and Katsis 1996. 4. The Russian Formalists coined the expression slovo kak takovoe or ‘the word as such’ to describe attempts by avant garde poets to liberate the word from its denotative function as a signifier and to celebrate its phonemic or formal properties. By analogy, “translation as such” would refer to the liberation of translation from its status as a mere reflection of the original.



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which is only partially understandable to the average educated Russian, Jakobson adds to the poem another level of “estrangement,” a quality considered by the Russian formalists to be a fundamental feature of any literary work and certainly a central theme of this poem. While Jakobson and Nabokov had much in common – they were both polyglots who saw themselves as translators, professors and writers – an interest in the Russian avant-garde was not one of them. Once while a guest at Jakobson’s house in Cambridge, Nabokov was forced to listen to his host recite a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov, whose avant-garde experiments with language and versification Jakobson greatly admired. After the recitation, Nabokov exclaimed quite audibly: “Eto uzhasno” (That’s terrible.) In fact, the entire evening reflected a subtle rivalry between the two great men. Nabokov started the evening off on the wrong foot when he forgot Jakobson’s patronymic (a necessary feature of polite Russian address). Brian Boyd notes that Nabokov “had trouble remembering the names of those he did not care for” (Boyd 1991: 215). After dinner, when guests were asked to recite a favorite poem, the two men both chose poems by Pushkin and “it became a competition between St. Petersburg and Moscow accents” (Boyd 1991: 215). If Jakobson’s theoretical writings on translation were influenced at least in part by the avant garde literary circles in which he was active since his university days, Nabokov’s great translation projects into English were surely influenced by his work as a professor of Russian literature. Nabokov’s concept of literal translation was one that developed during the years he spent on his English translation of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, which, like his translations of Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni and Slovo o polku Igoreve, were intended primarily or at least initially for American students of Russian literature. As Jane Grayson put it: “It is clear that in his translation of Evgeny Onegin Nabokov has a very specific public in view – a public with some knowledge of Russian who will use the translation in order to gain a better understanding of the original” (Grayson 1977: 17). Nabokov was a practitioner of literary translation, however, long before he became a professor of Russian literature and in the course of his literary career exercised a rather broad range of approaches to translation. Nabokov’s translation work can in fact be separated into three groups, each characterized by a specific translation approach: (1) the translation of his own works or his auto-translation; (2) translations of works by other authors into Russian; (3) translations of works by other authors into English (Grayson 1977). It was in the translation of his own work and the work of other authors into Russian that Nabokov most consistently violated the literal approach he would advocate with increasing vehemence throughout the 1950s. His poetic translations into Russian of such poets as Shakespeare, Byron, Rimbaud, and de Musset preserve both the rhyme scheme and the meter of the originals. So, too, do Nabokov’s translations into English of selected poems of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev that appeared under the title Three Russian Poets. And while translating his own works, he often took the opportunity to reedit them (Grayson 1977).

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One might also point to the literary or stylistic effects contained in Nabokov’s early translations. Consider, for example, his first major translation project, Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland, in which he affected a “wholesale transformation of characters and contexts, substituting Russian names and backgrounds for English ones” (Connelly 1995: 19). Moreover, by changing the name of the heroine to Anya, he produced a rather Nabokovian effect in the title of the work: Ania v strane chudes. One hears an echo of the name Ania in the word strane, so that the heroine, Anya, appears to be literally trapped – and somewhat distorted – in the Russian word for land. As Julian Connelly notes, Nabokov’s solutions to the translation of verse parody and punning throughout the work were especially ingenious. And yet, despite the fact that Connelly describes Nabokov’s translation as closer perhaps to an adaptation or a transposition than to a translation, it is with a certain temerity that he suggests any connection between Nabokov’s “original” work and his approach to translation: “One may ask whether it is possible to see in this text the outlines of elements that later attain prominence in Nabokov’s original fiction” (Connelly 1995: 24). Regarding the translation of Eugene Onegin, Alexander Dolinin is more daring, suggesting that Nabokov’s extreme “fidelity” may have also functioned as a kind of literary device: “Nabokov also aims at a peculiar – ‘defamiliarizing’ – aesthetic effect” (Dolinin 1995: 120). In recent years, scholars have shown themselves more willing to read Nabokov’s translations – even his most “scholarly ones” – as Nabokovian literary texts. Nicholas O. Warner’s study “The Footnote as Literary Genre: Nabokov’s Commentaries to Lermonotv and Pushkin” (1986) is an excellent case in point. William Harkins, Vladimir Alexandrov and Harvey Goldblatt have pointed out the artifice in Nabokov’s notes to the Slovo while others have noted broader generic similarities between Nabokov’s “scholarly” translations – especially the translation of Eugene Onegin with all accompanying commentary – and his original fiction. As Simon Karlinsky points out, “In The Gift Nabokov initiated his method of hybridizing his fictional narratives with scholarly literary genres, such as biography, annotation and literary history, a method that was later developed and expanded in Pale Fire, Ada, Look at the Harlequins as well as in the Onegin commentary” (Karlinsky 2001, 11–12, italics mine). In The Gift, the embedded text is a biography of the nineteenth century Russian radical, Nikolai Chernyshchevsky, and in Pale Fire, it is a poem written by an American poet, John Shade, and introduced by his editor, Charles Kinbote, who believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. In the introductory essay that opens Pale Fire, the reader begins to question the scholarly stance of the narrator at the end of paragraph three where Kinbote suddenly interjects, “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings” (Nabokov 1962: 13). One might compare this to Nabokov’s decision to open the twovolume Onegin translation and commentary with a poem “On Translation,” which, although ostensibly expressing the translator’s humility before the great author of the original, contains such humorous and exaggerated turns of phrase – the translation is described in the final line as “dove droppings on [Pushkin’s] monument” – that it is difficult not to



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read the poem as a parody, which brings a certain visibility to the translator. Moreover, several scholars and commentators have remarked that in Nabokov’s translations, his idiosyncratic footnotes and “recondite English and eccentric syntax” in fact “drew attention to the translator instead of conveying the sense and spirit of the original” (Meyers 2003: 437). Robert Conquest declared the translation to be “too much a transposition into Nabokovese, rather than a translation into English” (quoted in Meyers 2003: 437). As Jeffrey Meyers notes, “for most critics, the eccentricity and arrogance of the commentary complemented the failings of the translator” (2003: 437–8). To the extent that Nabokov’s “humble” scholarly approach was subverted in countless ways both in his translations themselves and in the accompanying paratextual material by his penchant for word play and verbal experimentation, it is indeed tempting to read them alongside his “original” work. To read across the divide of fiction and non-fiction, however, would force us to recognize that competing with Nabokov’s theoretical arguments on translation and challenging his humble stance as a translator is the writer’s personality in all its creative and ingenious mischievousness.5

Political subtexts The ultimate falling out between Jakobson and Nabokov took place around a proposed joint publication of Slovo o polku Igoreve, a Medieval (if the term can be applied to Russia) Russian text. The Slovo was purportedly discovered by Prince Musin-Pushkin in the late 18th century. The original version of the text was destroyed in the Moscow fire of 1812, which left only two late 18th century transcriptions. For this reason, the authenticity of the Slovo has long been under suspicion. Roman Jakobson’s interest in the Slovo stretched back to his university days in Moscow. He began studying the text in his freshman year and his first study of the tale was written in 1916. In the 1930s, Jakobson refuted the charges of inauthenticity leveled by the French Slavist André Mazon. Later, while a professor at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York, Jakobson led a seminar devoted to an examination of the Slovo’s authenticity. In the latter half of the 1940s, he prepared an edition of the Slovo with Marc Szeftel, a Russian specialist working in Cornell’s history department, which included an introductory essay by Jakobson, a critical edition of the Old Russian text by Jakobson, and translations of the Slovo into French, English, modern Russian and Polish. The volume ends with a lengthy essay by Jakobson in defense of the Slovo’s authenticity. It was published in 1948 under the title La geste du Prince Igor: une epopée russe du douzieme siecle. The choice to translate the amorphous generic title slovo as la geste suggests an interpretation of the work as a Medieval epic on a par with El Cid or 5. An exploration of the theme of “mimicry”, for instance, which runs throughout all of Nabokov’s writings from his fictional works to his scholarly essays on translation, literary criticism, and even butterflies, would be one way to trace common thematic concerns.

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La Chanson de Roland. Jakobson would continue to debate skeptics of the text’s authenticity into the 1960s. Nabokov became involved with the Slovo only in the late 1940s. At this time he was working at Cornell and translated the poem into English for use in his classes. This experience prompted him to write a lengthy review of the Jakobson-Szeftel edition, which included an English translation by Samuel Cross, which Nabokov considered stilted, and to prepare his own line-by-line translation of the text (Boyd 1991: 136). He approached Jakobson directly in 1949 while looking for a journal in which to publish his review. Jakobson suggested a journal and then proposed to include Nabokov’s translation of the Slovo in a volume for a series of Russian classics for students that Jakobson was editing. Nabokov agreed, but “by the time he had completed the translation of The Song of Igor’s Campaign in 1959, he would have broken off relations with Jakobson” (Boyd 1991: 145). A record of Nabokov’s increasingly adversarial relationship with Jakobson can be found in a footnote in the foreward to his translation, published under the title The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Nabokov wrote: I made a first attempt to translate Slovo o polku Igoreve in 1952. My object was purely utilitarian – to provide my students with an English text. In that first version I followed uncritically Roman Jakobson’s recension as published in La Geste du Prince Igor. Later, however, I grew dissatisfied not only with my own – much too readable – translation but also with Jakobson’s views. Mimeographed copies of that obsolete version which are still in circulation at Cornell and Harvard should now be destroyed. (Nabokov 1960: 82)

It was Jakobson’s trip to Moscow in 1956, during which the linguist supposedly wept upon his arrival in his native city, however, that led Nabokov to definitively withdraw from their collaboration on a new translation of the Slovo. “Your little trips to totalitarian countries,” as Nabokov put it in a letter to Jakobson, convinced him that the Harvard linguist was a foreign agent. Jakobson’s feelings for Nabokov were apparently at this time not much friendlier. It was in 1957 that he effectively scuttled the author’s attempt to land a position at Harvard. In any case, the question of the Slovo’s authenticity, which Jakobson defended on philological grounds, was thoroughly politicized in Russian emigré circles, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, against the backdrop of international hostilities and then war. Edmund Wilson, while in New York in 1942, witnessed a very lively debate over the Slovo at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes. He offered the following account to Nabokov: I attended, with Roman Grynberg, one of the sessions of the Ecole Libre devoted to the discussion of this problem. It was très mouvementé. The question had evidently become a patriotic issue. Vernadsky read a paper, in which he remarked that the French, not content with having destroyed the text at the time of Napoleon’s invasion, seemed now to want to deprive Russia of the honor of having produced



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the poem, and every time he demonstrated, writing the words upon a blackboard, that some detail of ancient warfare or dress had been confirmed by subsequent discovery, the Russians present broke into applause. [...] Roman Jakobson could not contain himself and made tumultuous interruptions. (Karlinsky 2001: 243)

Nabokov was never comfortable with the political debate surrounding the Slovo – or in general with the politicization of works of art. In 1948, for instance, he noted that “there is a touch of kvasnoi Russian patriotism about Vernadsky’s essay [contained in the Jakobson-Szeftel edition]” (Karlinsky 2001: 241) (although at the time he declared Jakobson’s essay to be “especially brilliant”). He later contrasted the “bard” who wrote the Slovo to the learned monk who recounted the same events in the Hypatian Chronicle. The former was an artist, the latter a historian. The differing views of Jakobson and Nabokov on the text were reflected in their respective translations of the title. Slovo is a very broad generic category, which includes such texts as the “homily, legend, orison, tale” (Terras 1991: 646). The translation edited by Jakobson was designated a “geste,” defined by Harrap’s as “a mediaeval verse chronicle (of heroic exploits),” while Nabokov chose quite deliberately to title his translation a “song,” foregrounding the narrative as first and foremost a work of art. As Harvey Goldblatt comments: “[Nabokov’s] decision to call the Slovo a ‘song’ was not so much the result of a scholarly inquiry into the questions of genre, literary characteristics, and compassion as a feeling the term ‘song’ best conveyed the notion of artistic merit, whereas the other terms did not” (Goldblatt 1995: 664). Paradoxically, Jakobson, a founder of Russian Formalism, would become associated in Nabokov’s mind with the crude politicization of literature and art that marked Cold War culture both in the USSR and in the United States, in part because of his impassioned defense of the Slovo’s authenticity. Nabokov had no patience with those who looked to literature to bolster their patriotic claims. As he wrote in his article on translating Onegin: “I shall now make a statement for which I am ready to incur the wrath of Russian patriots: Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837), the national poet of Russia, was as much a product of French literature as of Russian culture; and what happened to be added to this mixture, was individual genius which is neither Russian nor French, but universal and divine” (Nabokov 2000: 75). Or, as he told his students at Cornell in 1948: “I am not concerned with generalities, with ideas and schools of thought, with groups of mediocrities under a fancy flag. I am concerned with the specific text, the thing itself ” (Boyd 1991: 133). Jakobson’s position on such texts as the Slovo was somewhat different from Nabokov’s, although again perhaps more in emphasis than in essence. He, too, rejected the approach to such texts as “unqualified historical documents.” Rather, he “insisted that all factors – historical, social, and literary – must be taken into account in terms of their transformation into the intrinsic design of the folk epos itself ” (Pomorska, 209). While Jakobson maintained that the Slovo was an exemplary work of Old Russian literature, however, Nabokov saw it as a unique and anonymous work (Goldblatt 1995: 666). Moreover, in the face of Jakobson’s impassioned defense, Nabokov entertained “eerie doubts” as to the Slovo’s authenticity (Nabokov 1960, 14).

 Brian James Baer

In the foreward to his translation of the Slovo, which was published in 1960, Nabokov gave voice to a scathing denunciation of previous scholars who could not see the medieval tale first and foremost as a work of art: “Its political and patriotic slant pertaining to a given historical moment is, naturally, of small importance in the light of its timeless beauty, and although I have provided the reader with all necessary notes, I am not interested in considering The Song as a corollary of history or a birch-stump speech” (6). The true value of the Song, he argues is as a piece of literature. It is, he wrote, “a harmonious, many leveled, many hued, uniquely poetical structure created in a sustained and controlled surge of inspiration by an artist with a fondness for pagan gods and a percipience of sensuous things” (6, italics mine). Such an eloquent defense of “literariness” is a fine example of the Formalist approach to literary studies, developed and championed by, among others, Roman Jakobson. Nabokov here advocates Formalism – which by this time had become anathema in the USSR. Traveling to Soviet Russia as Jakobson did was unthinkable for Nabokov, who may have had the linguist’s trip in mind when he wrote the postscript to his Russian translation of Lolita. In this very insightful and beautifully written piece, Nabokov discusses the difficulties he encountered in rendering his most famous novel into Russian, attributing them not only to his estrangement from his mother tongue but to the “spirit of the language into which the translation is done” [dukh iazyka, na kotoryi perevod delaetsia(2004:380). What follows is a brief foray into comparative sytlistics, in which he analyzes the different expressive capabilities and capacities “between the green Russian language and English, which is like a ripe fig, bursting at the seams” [mezhdu zelenym russkim iazykom i zrelym, kak lopaiuschaiaisia po shvam smokva, iazykom angliiskim] (ibid.). He closes the piece by wondering who the audience might be for this Russian translation. Gazing into his crystal ball, he sees: “some old friends, a group of emigrés (who generally prefer Leskov), a touring poet from the Soviet Union, the make-up artist for a theater troupe, three Polish or Serbian delegates in a mirror-filled cafe, and there, way in the distance, I see the beginnings of some vague movements, some signs of enthusiasm, the approaching shapes of young men waving their hands... but no, they’re just asking me to move over – so they can photograph the arrival of some president or other in Moscow. (2004:382)” Interestingly, Nabokov imagines himself returning not to Saint Petersburg – his beloved native city – but to Moscow, the new Soviet capital, to which Jakobson returned several times beginning in 1956.6 In the final image of the postscript, that of the author shunted aside to make room for a visiting politician, Nabokov condemns the increasing marginalization of (formal) artistic considerations in favor of political or ideological concerns, which he discerned in, Jakobson’s patriotic defense of the Slovo’s 6. Stephen Rudy has documented two incidents in which Jakobson was questioned in connection with the McCarthy hearings. Apparently the suspicion of communist sympathies related to the chair in Czechoslovak Studies he occupied at Columbia University, which was supposedly funded by the communist government of Czechoslovakia. See Rudy 1999.



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authenticity. In any case, by reconstructing the specific contexts that informed and transformed the theoretical positions of these two great and complex cultural figures and agents of translation, we acknowledge that translation theory has many histories, histories that are shaped not only by philosophical inquiry and disciplinary trends but by personal relationships and political differences.

Works cited Boyd, Brian. 1991. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Connolly, Julian W. 1995. “Ania v strane chudes.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, edited by V. Alexandrov, 18–24. New York: Garland. Dolinin, Alexander. 1995. “Eugene Onegin.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, edited by V. Alexandrov, 117–129. New York: Garland. Frank, Joseph. 1990. “Roman Jakobson: The Master Linguist.” In Through the Russian Prism. Essays on Literature and Culture, 3–17. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goldblatt, Harvey. 1995. “The Song of Igor’s Campaign.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, edited by V. Alexandrov, 661–672. New York: Garland. Grayson, Jane. 1977. Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov’s Russian and English Prose. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmes, James. 2000. “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, 172–185. London: Routledge. Jakobson, Roman. 1948. La geste du Prince Igor’. Epopée russe du douzième siecle. New York: Rausen Brothers. –—. 1987. “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry.” In Language in Literature, edited by K. Pomorska and S. Rudy, 121–144. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP. –—. 1992. Iakobson – budetlianin: sbornik materialov, edited by B. Jangfeldt. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell Int. –—. 1997. My Futurist Years, edited by B. Jangfeldt. Trans. S. Rudy. New York: Marsilio. –—. 2000. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” The Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, 113–118. London: Routledge. Karlinsky, Simon, ed. 2001. Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971. Rev. and expanded edition.Berkeley: University of California Press. Katsis, L.F. 1996. “O perevode na staroslavianskii i bolgarskii iazyki stikhotvoreniia Vladimira Maiakovskogo ‘Nichego ne ponimaiut.” In Contributions to the International Congress “Roman Jakobson Centennial,” 211–212. Moscow: Russkii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet. Meyers, Jeffrey. 2003. Edmund Wilson. A Biography. New York: Cooper Square Press. Milton, John and Paul Bandia. 2009. Introduction. In Agents of Translation, edited by J. Milton and P. Bandia, 1–18. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1944. Three Russian Poets. Selections from Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions. –—. 1960. The Song of Igor’s Campaign. An Epic of the Twelfth Century. New York: Vintage Books. –—. 1962. Pale Fire; a Novel. New York: Putnam.

 Brian James Baer –—. 1981. “The Art of Translation.” In Lectures on Russian Literature, edited by F. Bowers, 315– 321. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. –—. 1990. Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse. Volume I: Introduction and Translation. 2nd Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. –— (trans., with the collaboration of Dmitri Nabokov). 1992. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf. –—. 2000. “Problems of Translation: ‘Onegin’ in English.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, 71–83. London: Routledge. Nabokov, Vladimir. 2004. “Postskriptum k russkomu izdaniiu” [Postscript to the Russian Edition]. In Lolita, 380-382. Moscow: ACT. Pomorska, Krystina. 1985. Handbook of Russian Literature, edited by V. Terras, 207–210. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rudy, Stephen. 1999. “Iakobson pri makkartizme.” In Roman Iakobson; Teksty, Dokumenty, issledovaniia. Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet. Venuti, Lawrence. 2000. “1940s-1950s.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, 65–70. London and New York: Routledge. Warner, Nicholas O. 1986. “The Footnote as Literary Genre: Nabokov’s Commentaries to Lermontov and Pushkin.” Slavic and East European Journal 30.2: 167–182.

The poetics and politics of Joseph Brodsky as a Russian poet-translator* Yasha Klots

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA Ideological censorship, which held the reins of literary activity in the Soviet Union, forced many disgraced poets into translation, a relatively “safe art.” While trying to make their way into print and earn a living, author-translators fertilized Russian poetry with hitherto unknown masterpieces of world literature, even though accomplishing this mission would require them also to translate enormous quantities of ideologically-friendly production, as well. In the history of Russian literary translation, the process of reconciling one’s own aesthetic predispositions to the ideological demands of the state-owned publishing industry became an important landmark, which not only instituted translation as a major branch of literary activity but also endowed it with a genuinely poetic, and even moral, dimension. In a sense, the popular term “poet-translator” is nearly as emblematic of the Soviet era as censorship itself: while ennobling the craft of translation and putting it on a par with the art of poetry, on the one hand, it also reflected the state-driven tendency to reduce the original art of “unreliable” poets to, at best, the mere transmission of foreign literatures into his or her native tongue, on the other. Russian poet-translators, however, would come across an impressive number of poets whose influence on their own poetics is hard to underestimate. Such was the case of Russian poet and Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky. This chapter explores how translation broadened Brodsky’s linguistic horizons and provided him with an additional spectrum of creative opportunities, which would have remained utterly inaccessible within the confines of just one (native) language and culture. Civilization is the sum total of different cultures animated by a common spiritual numerator, and its main vehicle – speaking both metaphorically and literary – is translation. Joseph Brodsky, “The Child of Civilization” * My special thanks to the late Lev Losev for some exclusive information and general support, Tomas Venclova for his consultations on Brodsky’s translations from Polish, Dina Odnopozova for her help with Spanish and Italian. I am indebted to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University for a research grant that enabled me to use the archival materials.

 Yasha Klots

The history of the few official publications of Joseph Brodsky in Soviet Russia begins in the fall of 1962, when his translation of a poem by Pablo Armando Fernandez, a “progressive” Cuban poet, appeared in the anthology Заря над Кубой [Dawn above Cuba], commissioned, essentially, as part of the Soviet campaign to promote comradely writers from abroad in the USSR.1 The same year, Brodsky’s friend Lev Losev managed to publish his poem for children “Баллада о маленьком буксире” [Ballad of a Little Tugboat] in the November issue of the Leningrad pioneers’ magazine Костер [Campfire], where Losev worked as an editor.2 During the next ten years until his exile in 1972, Brodsky willy-nilly followed the ill-famed trajectory of the literary process under Soviet rule, according to which a major poet could emerge on the official literary scene only as a translator or a children’s author. It was this notorious tradition, however, that shaped Russia’s inimitable literature for children, paving the way for its “golden age,” and gave rise to the prodigious school of poetic translation – a so-called “safe art” (Etkind 1978: 146), which served as a sanctuary for many disgraced poets, whose original works were not only censored but often entirely banned. Naturally, the industry of poetic translation also welcomed “reputable” Soviet writers, who appreciated the pecuniary opportunities it offered. Yakov Gordin recalls that in 1959, at a meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers, even Boris Slutsky, an established poet and Soviet veteran of WWII, unequivocally declared: “If we are wearing good jackets, it’s only because of our poetic translations!” (quoted in Gordin 2001: 3).3 At the same time, as Gordin also mentions in relation to Brodsky’s works, poetic translation was a tribute to world culture; it was a means both of collecting and of paying that tribute; it was also a form of transition, a system of interconnected vessels (5). “By devoting themselves to the preservation of the ‘classics of world literature’ [...],” observes Brian James Baer, “literary translators perpetuated the concepts of timeless ‘universal values’ and ‘world culture’ that were in opposition to what they saw as the tendentious, politicized, and class-based official culture of the Soviet Union” (Baer 2006: 539).4 Brodsky’s name, no doubt, belongs to the list of Russian poet-translators who, while trying to make their way into print and earn a living, fertilized Russian poetry with hitherto unknown masterpieces of world literature, even though accomplishing 1. “Мои уста не скажут” [My lips won’t tell] in: Zaria nad kuboi. 1962. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. 140–141. Published in the quantity of 10,000 copies. 2. Koster. 1962. №11. The poem was heavily edited and significantly abridged. 3. See also Arsenii Tarkovskii’s famous poem “Переводчик” [A Translator] (1960): “Для чего я лучшие годы / Продал за чужие слова?” [Why did I trade my best years / For other people’s words?] 4. Baer adds that, “translated literature acquired special significance in the context of Soviet travel restrictions to non-socialist countries and restrictions on interaction with foreign visitors from the West. For many Soviet readers works of foreign literature served as a window onto a semi-forbidden world” (541).



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this mission would require them also to translate heaps of “ideologically friendly” production, which did not necessarily agree with their own poetics but often exceeded in number their translations chosen for aesthetic reasons and non-conformist purposes. In the history of Russian poetic translation, the process of reconciling one’s aesthetic predispositions to the ideological demands of the state-owned publishing industry became an important landmark, which, in fact, not only instituted translation as a major branch of literary activity but also endowed it with a unique poetic dimension. In a sense, the popular term “poet-translator,” widely applied to poets who in the sixties and seventies took refuge in poetic translation, is nearly as emblematic of the Soviet era as censorship itself: while ennobling the craft of translation and putting it on a par with the art of poetry, it reflected the state-driven tendency to reduce the original art of an “unreliable” poet to at best the mere transmission of foreign literatures into his or her native tongue. The ultimate effect, however, would sometimes turn out to be quite the opposite, as was the case with Brodsky. Filtering out “comradely” authors translated on demand, he happened to come across an impressive number of poets whose influence on his own poetics is difficult to underestimate. Moreover, translation inspired Brodsky to study the languages of the translated poets. The experience of both studying the language and translating from it, especially as far as it concerns English, not only broadened Brodsky’s own linguistic horizons but also provided him with an additional spectrum of poetic opportunities which would have remained utterly inaccessible within the confines of just one (native) language. In 1992, annotating the first selection of Brodsky’s translations, Victor Kulle warned that drawing a line between Brodsky’s translations made “for the soul” and those intended to earn a living would be a risky enterprise (Kulle 1992: 282–283). Indeed, the range of authors translated by Brodsky into Russian appears to be too widely spaced along both linguistic and ideological axes to reduce his overall translation legacy to a common denominator. Brodsky translated from seventeen languages (Armenian, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Georgian, German, Ancient and Modern Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish, Spanish), while the number of authors he translated (from twenty-two countries) exceeded seventy. In terms of genre, Brodsky’s translations include, in addition to poetry, two plays (Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow),5 two short stories (Spike Milligan’s The Bald Twit Lion and George Orwell’s Hunting the Elephant),6 scripts for cartoons, poetry for children, 5. Translations from Stoppard [“Розенкранц и Гильденстерн мертвы”] and Behan [“Говоря о веревке”] were published in the journal Inostrannaia literatura [Foreign Literature], respectively, in 1990 (4), 83–135, and in 1995 (2), 161–198. 6. Translation from Milligan remains unpublished. See Brodsky’s Archive at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, Fund 1333, File 408 – hereafter: RNL, 1333, File No. Translation from Orwell (“Убивая слона”) was published in: Glagol. 1977 (1). Ann Arbor: Ardis. 153–161.

 Yasha Klots

riddles and folk legends, aphorisms by Stanisław Jerzy Lec from the Polish,7 and songs (e.g., the German war tune Lili Marleen and Yellow Submarine by The Beatles). The historical periods of the authors that Brodsky either introduced or rediscovered for the Russian reader also range greatly: from antiquity (sections of Euripides’s Medea8) and the English Renaissance (John Donne and Andrew Marvell), to his own time. In addition, after his emigration to the U.S., Brodsky edited other translators’ work, such as Russian renditions of Cavafy, originally made by Gennady Shmakov, a remarkable translator of the Leningrad school (who, incidentally, used to supply Brodsky with interlinear translations from various languages while both still lived in Leningrad).9 Furthermore, as he was gradually establishing himself in the English language, Brodsky translated some of his favorite Russian and Polish poets into English (Tsvetaeva, Mandelshtam, Szymborska, Herbert), as well as others, such as Nabokov.10 He actively participated in debates on translating Russian poetry into English, closely supervised translations of his own verse, eventually becoming a self-translator.11

First steps While Brodsky’s debut as a translator in the Cuban anthology in 1962 was to earn money (translators were paid per line), just a year later he was studying Polish on his own and translating Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (1905–1953) from the original, reading his work to his friends, as well as to a large professional audience at Efim Etkind’s workshop on poetic translation. (In addition, knowing Polish offered him the 7.

Unpublished; RNL, 1333, File 376.

8. Zvezda. 1995 (12). 75–77. In 1994, this partial translation of Euripides’s Medea was commissioned to Brodsky by Yuri Lubimov, the director of the “Taganka” Theater, who wanted to “modernize” his stage production by retranslating some of the sections of an older Russian translation of Medea (by Annenskii). See Lubimov 2001: 556–559. 9. First published in the literary supplement of Russkaia mysl №7 (November 11, 1988, №3750). In one of his interviews Brodsky explains that not long before Shmakov’s death in 1988 he offered him the opportunity to publish his translations from Cavafy and, while preparing the publication, reworked some of them (Brodskii 2005: 630). Brodsky edited 19 translations from Cavafy by Shmakov and, before then, made one on his own, “Darius.” 10. On Brodsky’s translation of Nabokov’s poem “Demon,” see Kulle 1999. 11. See, for example, Brodsky’s annihilating review of a book of English translations from Velimir Khlebnikov by Paul Schmidt (The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985) in The New Republic, 705.3 (January 20, 1986), 32–35, and subsequent polemics in The New Republic, 712.3 (March 10, 1986), 2. Brodsky’s review contains his own translation of Khlebnikov’s poem “A Zoo.” See also Brodsky’s earlier, much more favorable review of a book of English translations from Anna Akhmatova (Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Selected, translated and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. Boston: Little Brown, 1973) in The New York Review of Books 20 (August 9, 1973), 9–11.



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chance to read such authors as Kafka, Faulkner, Proust, etc., whose works were unavailable in the Soviet Union but occasionally published in the Polish magazine Przekrój). Etkind recalls: Иосиф Бродский выступил в устном альманахе ‘Впервые на русском языке’, к тому времени уже несколько лет выходившем под моим руководством в Доме писателя имени Маяковского. [...] Выступление Бродского перед набитым залом не походило ни на какие другие: его словесно-музыкальный фанатизм действовал магнетически; он читал стихи польского поэта Константы Ильдефонса Галчинского: ‘Завороженные дрожки, / Завороженный возница, / Завороженный конь...’ и зал тоже сидел – завороженный, хотя поначалу невнятные нагромождения картавых ‘р’ могли даже показаться смешными. (Etkind 1998: 38–39) [Brodsky took part in the oral anthology “First Time in the Russian Language,” which several years before I instituted at the Mayakovsky House of Writers. [...] Brodsky’s reading in front of the full audience was unlike anyone else’s: his musicalverbal fanaticism produced a magnetic effect; he read from the Polish poet Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński: “The enchanted droshky, / the enchanted coachman, / the enchanted horse...,” and the audience also sat enchanted, although at first his indistinct agglomerations of poorly pronounced “r”s seem could even funny.]

Another memoirist cites Brodsky’s letter, presumably addressed to an editor who planned to publish his translations from Gałczyński. In this letter, Brodsky defends his translation approach against the publisher’s demands to remain closer to the original. Brodsky explains the liberties he had allowed himself by taking the perspective of the Russian reader, who could hardly be expected to be familiar with the Polish realia in Gałczyński’s text: В тех немногих случаях, когда я отходил от текста (особенно в Заговоренных дрожках), я сделал это вовсе не по неспособности сочинить нечто адекватное оригиналу, а исходя из представления о читателе, которому вообще следует давать елико возможно больше лазеек в новом для него мире. А мир Заговоренных дрожек для русского читателя, в общем, новый. [...] Поэтому буквализм в переводе этих стихов, по-моему, рискован. Чуть длинней, чуть живописней – зато понятней. И (опять же по-моему) малость пластичней. Прочтя этот перевод, я думаю, читатель не станет думать о Галчинском хуже... (Alloi 2008: 71–72)12 12. A few pages below, Rada Alloi recalls Brodsky’s reading both the original and his translations from Gałczyński to a group of friends: “Стихи Галчинского были одними из первых, Иосиф требовал от нас выслушивать и польский текст” [Gałczyński’s’s poems were among the first ones; Iosif demanded that we listen to the Polish original as well] (79). Although the letter cited above is not dated, it was presumably written around 1967, when three of Brodsky’s translations from Gałczyński, including “Zagovorennye drozhki,” came out in Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński. 1967. Stikhi. Мoskva: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Brodsky translated six

 Yasha Klots

[In the few cases when I deviated from the text (especially in “Enchanted Droshky”), I did so not because of my inability to compose something adequate to the original, but out of [my own] idea of the reader who, generally speaking, has to be given as many loopholes into the new world as possible. And for the Russian reader, the world of “Enchanted Droshky” is rather new. [...] That is why, I think, it is risky to be too literal in translating this poem. Slightly longer, slightly more vivid – but clearer. And (again, in my own opinion) slightly more pliant, too. I don’t suppose that, having read the translation, the reader will think worse of Gałczyński.]

Brodsky’s work on Gałczyński reveals both his professionalism as a translator and his firm standing as a poet: for him, translation could not be reduced to a mere communication of foreign words in his native tongue; it was, above all, an opportunity to develop his own poetic skills. Kulle points out a series of traces left by Gałczyński in Brodsky’s original verse. For example, his “Литовский дивертисмент” [Lithuanian Divertimento] (1971), among other works based on a musical principle, echoes the composition of a Gałczyński poem structured as a sonata (Kulle 1995: 272–274). Gordin remarks, in the same vein, that Brodsky’s foremost goal was to organically absorb into his native Russian the great spiritual and poetic experience of world literature, to put it into use precisely as an experience (Gordin 2001: 5). Perhaps the most striking case of poetic apprenticeship lies in the affinities between Brodsky and John Donne. Brodsky started to translate Donne in 1964 in Norenskaia, the northern village of his exile, for the first time introducing the English metaphysical poet to the Russian reader. While Gałczyński was already somewhat known in Russia before Brodsky, Donne’s name scarcely appeared anywhere except in the popular epigraph to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Donne’s reputation was mainly associated with his sermons rather than with his poetry. In 1963, a year before he actually read Donne’s poetry, Brodsky wrote his famous “Большая элегия Джону Донну” [Elegy to John Donne], which anticipated his subsequent work on Donne as a translator and devoted student. A few years later, Brodsky’s translations from Donne, some of which were still made from an interlinear trot, circulated among his friends and were perceived as an organic part of his original poetry. In Russian, observed Etkind, John Donne is phenomenal: simultaneously modern and traditional; and as such he resembles Brodsky himself (Etkind 1988: 39). One can see a striking continuity between Donne’s and Brodsky’s love lyrics, their use of geometrical imagery and the intensified attention to detail around which many of their poems are poems by Gałczyński, only one of which did not come out in the Soviet Union (“Pesnia o znameni”) and was for the first time published by Viktor Kulle in 1992. Two more anthologies, which came out within the next four years, included Brodsky’s translations from Gałczyński, as well as other Polish poets (Leopold Staff, Jerzy Harasymowicz, Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz): Vysokie derevia. Stikhi polskikh poetov (Moskva: Detskaia literatura, 1969) and Sovremennaia polskaia peziia (Moskva: Progress, 1971).



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constructed. As Brodsky admitted, the most important lesson he learned from Donne was the intricate stanzaic organization of a poem (not so much because Brodsky was indifferent to this aspect of versification, but merely because there had been no such tradition in Russian poetry before) (Brodskii 2005: 126–127). While Brodsky translated only seven poems by John Donne (roughly 360 lines), Donne’s influence on his poetics can hardly be overstated.13

The trial and northern exile In February 1964 at his famous show trial, Brodsky was accused of “social parasitism” and sentenced to five years of exile and forced labor in the northern village Norenskaia. Despite the fact that his record as a translator was by that time still rather short, it was Brodsky’s translation activity that came to be the main, if not the only, argument in his defense. The protocols of the court session, recorded by Frida Vigdorova and circulated in samizdat, reveal a characteristic clash between the prosecutor and Brodsky’s attorney, Zinaida Toporova (mother of the critic and translator Victor Toporov). While the former was accusing Brodsky of refusing to work for the benefit of Soviet society, dismissing his original poetry as unworthy, the latter referred to Brodsky’s translations as an admissible form of socially useful occupation (also mentioning in passing his publications as a children’s author). The two witnesses in Brodsky’s defense, the poet Natalya Grudinina and Professor Efim Etkind, also emphasized his achievements as a translator, while the remaining witnesses, having no relation to literature whatsoever, added fuel to the prosecutor’s charges by castigating Brodsky’s poetry for its pernicious influence on Soviet youth (see Varshavskii 1998). After the trial, a number of prominent literary figures signed an appeal to the General Prosecutor of the USSR to release Brodsky and allow him to return to Leningrad, in which they also stressed his talent and ability to earn his living as a “poet-translator.” It was partially because of this appeal that Brodsky’s sentence was eventually reduced from five years to a year and a half: [...] Мы, нижеподписавшиеся, профессиональные литераторы, просим освободить И.А. Бродского от пребывания на поселении, ограничив срок его осуждения временем, истекшим со дня приговора. Мы хотели бы, чтобы Бродский вернулся к полюбившейся ему работе – работе поэтапереводчика. В течение полутора лет, предшествовавших его осуждению, любимый труд, литературная среда и первые успехи на избранном поприще явственно излечивали Бродского от заблуждений и ошибок прошлого. [...] К. Чуковский, К. Паустовский, Ф. Вигдорова, Н. Грудинина, Н. Долинина, Лидия Чуковская, Анна Ахматова, Д. Дар, Б. Вахтин, Е. Гнедин, Глеб Семенов, 13. See, for example: Kline 1965, Ivanov 1988 and 1997, Bethea 1994, Shaitanov 1998, Pervushina.

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Э. Линецкая, Т. Хмельницкая, В. Адмони, Е. Эткинд14 [[...] We professional writers and literary critics who have signed below ask that I.A. Brodskii be released from forced settlement and that the term of his sentence be reduced to the period that has passed from the day of his trial. We would like Brodskii to resume the work he loved – that of a poet-translator. During the year and a half before his imprisonment, his work, the literary milieu and the progress he had made in his chosen field, clearly, cured Brodskii from the mistakes and delusions of his past. [...] K. Chukovskii, K. Paustovskii, F. Vigdorova, N. Grudinina, N. Dolinina, Lidiia Chukovskaia, Anna Akhmatova, D. Dar, B. Vakhtin, E. Gnedin, Gleb Semenov, E. Linetskaia, T. Khmelnitskaia, V. Admoni, E. Etkind]

At the trial, unless specifically asked to speak of his poetry, Brodsky himself also referred mainly to his translation activity, listing his signed and pending contracts with publishers: his translations from the Yugoslavian poets Milan Rakić and Tin Ujević for Антология Югославской поэзии [An Anthology of Yugoslavian Poetry] (Moscow, 1963), the aforementioned anthology of Cuban poets (1962), and a translation from the Argentine poet José Ramόn Luna for Поэзия гаучо [The Poetry of Gaucho] (Moscow, 1964). Brodsky’s pending publications included translations of Polish, Bulgarian and Serbian poets for the anthology Голоса друзей [Friends’ Voices], from the Czech poet Yaroslav Seifert (still to be found among Brodsky’s unpublished work) and from Gałczyński, published three years later in a book of Gałczyński’s poetry (Moscow, 1967). When asked if he actually knew the languages he translated from, Brodsky replied that he had studied English and Polish, but was then confronted with his translations from Serbian in order to question his professional expertise. When Brodsky replied that he was using an interlinear, the judges, hardly competent in literary matters, grew puzzled and had to be enlightened about the difference between word-for-word and poetic translation. Another question that interested the court was if the payment that Brodsky received depended on whether or not he used interlinear translations: Адвокат: Скажите, является ли предосудительной работа по переводу стихов с использованием подстрочника? Грудинина: Многие переводы выполняются с помощью подстрочника. Это нормальная форма работы над поэтическим переводом. Гитович, например, переводил с древнекитайского только по подстрочникам. Адвокат: Уменьшается ли сумма гонорара при использовании подстрочного перевода? Грудинина: Да, естественно. [...] Адвокат: Каков, приблизительно, заработок молодых переводчиков? Грудинина: Он очень невысок. Среди начинающих поэтов-переводчиков известна шуточная пословица: разница между переводчиком и тунеядцем 14. Brodsky’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: GEN MSS 613, Box 3, Folder 92 (hereafter – Beinecke, Box No., Folder No.).



The poetics and politics of Joseph Brodsky as a Russian poet-translator 

состоит в том, что тунеядец не работает, но ест, а переводчик работает, но не ест. Судья: Это нам не понятно... (Varshavskii 1998: 279–280)15 [Attorney: Tell us, is poetic translation from an interlinear considered reprehensible? Grudinina: Many translators work with an interlinear. It’s normal when you work on poetic translation. Gitovich, for example, translated from Old Chinese – only from an interlinear. Attorney: Does the translator’s remuneration decrease when an interlinear is used? Grudinina: Yes, naturally. [...] Attorney: What’s the approximate wage of a young translator? Grudinina: It’s by no means high. There is a popular comic saying among young poet-translators: the difference between a translator and a social parasite is that the parasite eats but does not work, while the translator works but does not eat. Judge: That is unclear to us...]

Risking her own career and social standing, Grudinina praised Brodsky’s work and placed him above many avowed translators, while Etkind, supporting his speech with the opinions of the great Russian translators Kornei Chukovskii and Samuil Marshak, spoke of Brodsky’s responsible attitude, astonishing diligence and deep understanding of the material he translated. For praising the “social parasite,” both witnesses paid a price, but in a sense, their testimonies, as well as the trial itself, only publicized Brodsky’s reputation as a translator. Brodsky’s case, staged as a show trial, not only revealed the despotism of the regime but also illustrated the authorities’ proclivity to recognize the labor of a translator as more controllable and certainly less corrosive to society than the original work of a dubious poet. Contrary to authorities’ expectations, the period of Brodsky’s internal exile turned out to be extremely fruitful, as illustrated by his further development as a poet and translator. Shortly before the arrest, during his stay in Moscow in January 1964, Brodsky met Andrei Sergeev, whose role in Brodsky’s translation career is hard to underestimate. According to Sergeev, Brodsky was looking for some “clean” translations and asked him for advice as to what he should work on (“clean,” at the time, meant “non-progressive” poetry, preferably in a western language). Half a year later, while Brodsky was already in exile, Sergeev encouraged him not to give up translation; they corresponded about various collaborative projects, such as translating Robert Browning. Sergeev supplied Brodsky with work: for example, he sent him three texts by the Australian poets Flexmore Hudson and Chris Wallace-Crabb, all of which came out in 15. As indicated in Brodsky’s contracts with the publishers, the average pay for poetic translations ranged from 70 kopeks to 1 ruble per line, depending on the publisher and, presumably, the language of the translated text. 10 kopek would usually be withheld from the translator (per line) to cover the cost of an interlinear, when it was used. See RNL, 1333, File 39.

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Brodsky’s translation in the anthology Поэзия Австралии [Poetry of Australia] (Moscow, 1967) three years later. But most importantly, even though Brodsky had already translated from English before, it was in Norenskaia that he truly embarked upon the study and translation of Anglo-American poetry. Sergeev recalls: В Норенском он выдумал гениальную систему самообразования. Брал английское стихотворение, которое в антологии или сборнике ему почемулибо приглянулось. Со словарем по складам переводил первую строчку, точно так же расшифровывал последнюю. Мог ошибиться, конечно. А потом подсчитывал число строк и заполнял середину по своему разумению. Лучшей школы стиха не придумать. (Sergeev 1997: 432)16 [In Norenskaia he worked out an ingenious system of self-education. In this or that anthology, he would pick an English poem, which for some reason he liked. Then, syllable by syllable, he would translate the first line with a dictionary and then decipher the poem’s last line in exactly the same manner. He could make a mistake, of course. After that he would calculate the number of lines and fill in the middle of the poem according to his own understanding. It’s hard to imagine a better school of verse.]

Despite the outright persecution and the famous trial, it would be a stretch to say that Brodsky ever considered his translations in exile, as well as his exile itself, as a heroic deed, while the fates of other literary translators’ in the Soviet Union well deserve to be called heroic (such is the case of Tatiana Gnedich, who memorized her entire translation of Childe Harold in prison and committed it to paper only after release). Brodsky’s translations of that period were more than a means of self-preservation under harsh circumstances; they triggered a profound reevaluation of his role as a poet (a “poettranslator”), of the relationship of his native Russian to English, and of language itself.

Before emigration Despite Brodsky’s reluctance to dramatize his confrontation with the regime, it was after his exile (that is, roughly, in the years 1965–72) that political themes, though often disguised as overtly apolitical, began to appear in his original poetry.17 Incidentally, it was also 16. Lev Losev, Brodsky’s friend and biographer, also indicates that it was in Norenskaia that Brodsky started reading English poetry in earnest. In the evenings, in his hut by the river on the outskirts of the village, nothing prevented him from looking up an accurate Russian correspondence for this or that English word in a dictionary, from a close reading of English texts. A sideeffect of such close readings was Brodsky’s passive knowledge of the English language, but his greatest interest at the time was not so much a different language but a different poetry. Not only were English poems different from Russian ones, they were not even similar to the translations he had read previously (Losev 2006: 110). 17. See, for example, Losev 1990.



The poetics and politics of Joseph Brodsky as a Russian poet-translator 

during that period that his work as a translator reached its highest intensity. In the socalled “creative report,”18 submitted to the Leningrad division of the Union of Soviet Writers on December 25, 1967, Brodsky lists his translations from Georgian (five poems by Otar Chiladze)19 and Spanish (seven poems by Ángela Figuera Aymerich for a collection of her verse Жестокая красота [Cruel Beauty] published in Moscow in 1968); he also mentions his work on the English Metaphysical poets for the anthology Поэзия английского барокко [Poetry of the English Baroque].20 In 1967, Brodsky translated “For the Union Dead” by Robert Lowell and, at the end of the year, six poems by Richard Wilbur. In his letter to Lowell (for some reason written in Russian) Brodsky congratulates the American poet on his 50th birthday and asks him about some “purely American realia” which he found rather difficult to understand. In the “unofficial” part of the letter, as Brodsky called it, he asks Lowell about Wilbur and expresses his fascination with American poetry: Сэр, я не убежден, что наша переписка будет оживленной, поэтому я хотел бы сейчас убить сразу двух зайцев. Во-первых, я хочу высказать предположение, что Вы – поэт превосходный. А во-вторых хочу просить Вас, поэта предположительно – превосходного, передать привет поэту превосходному абсолютно – мистеру Ричарду Уилберу. Надеюсь, что бестактность этой фразы нейтрализована тем обстоятельством, что я перевожу все-таки Вас, а не его. Вообще же должен Вам сказать, что я восхищен американской поэзией XX века: Робинсон, Фрост, Стивенс, масса других, да еще Ваше поколение. Приятно видеть такое здоровье.21 [Sir, I am not sure that our correspondence will be an intensive one, so I would like now to kill two birds with one stone. First, I want to put forward the presumption that you are an excellent poet. Second, I want to ask you, a presumably excellent poet, to give my regards to an absolutely excellent poet, Mr. Richard Wilbur. I hope that the impudence of this phrase is neutralized by the fact that, after all, I translate you, not him. On the whole, I should tell you that I greatly admire American poetry of the 20th century: Robinson, Frost, Stevens, many others, and also your generation. It’s nice to see such health.] 18. Beinecke, GEM MSS MISC, Grp. 3090, File F-1. 19. Four of which were first published in Literaturnaia Gruziia 1989 (1), 96–99; the other has recently been published in Brodskii 2010: 293. 20. Archival materials indicate that the project of publishing the anthology was accepted as early as November 1966. Incidentally, the introduction and commentary to the volume were commissioned to Viktor Zhirmunskii, who patronized Brodsky in academic publishing. In June, 1968, Brodsky signed thed contract with “Nauka,” the main academic publisher in the Soviet Union, and made a commitment to submit his work by August, 1970. However, no subsequent papers related to “Nauka” were found in Brodsky’s pre-emigration archive in St. Petersburg, except a signed contract, dated April, 1972, to translate several poems by Petrarch, which Brodsky must have abandoned because of his departure from the USSR just two months later. See Brodsky’s contracts with Soviet publishers in his Russian archive (RNL, 1333, File 39). 21. RNL, 1333, File 446.

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In the second half of the sixties and early seventies, apart from Anglo-American poetry, Brodsky continued translating from Armenian, Dutch, Italian, Modern Greek, Polish, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish.22 In addition to those already mentioned above, some of the editions that include Brodsky’s translations before 1972 are: Мы из XX века [We Are from the 20th Century] (Moscow, 1965), Одна жизнь. Стихи и поэмы by the Czech poet Vilém Závada [One Life. Poems] (Moscow, 1967), Остров зари багряной. Кубинская поэзия XX века [The Island of Crimson Dawn. Cuban Poetry of the 20th Century] (Moscow, 1968), Ярость благородная. Антифашистская поэзия Европы [Lofty Fury. Anti-Fascist European Poetry] (Moscow, 1970), and Стихотворения by Desanka Maksimović [Poems] (1971). A number of time-consuming translations that Brodsky worked on at the time, such as the plays by Stoppard and Behan, were published only much later, either in the West or in Russia following glasnost. Some of Brodsky’s translations after Norenskaia and before his emigration to the U.S. require special attention due to the unusual history of their publication. In his interview for Radio Praha, Oleg Malevich, a critic and translator who at the time of Brodsky’s release was compiling a collection of poetry by Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval, recalls that the benevolent editors of the Moscow publishing house offered Brodsky the opportunity to translate a few poems, but when they received the translations full of enjambments so distinctive of Brodsky but uncharacteristic of Nezval, they advised him to revisit his work. Brodsky refused, claiming that he had already done everything he could. Soon afterwards Brodsky was banished from the Soviet Union, and the editors had to commission the work to another translator.23 A similar situation arose when the Moscow publisher Художественная литература [Artistic Literature] offered Brodsky the opportunity to translate another Czech poet, František Halas. In April, 1970, the contract was signed, but the publication was postponed until June 1972, when Brodsky had already left Russia, and the poems were again re-commissioned to a different translator, while those translated by Brodsky appeared in print only after his death in Литературная газета [Literary Newspaper] (March 6, 1996). Brodsky’s translations from Cyprian Norwid, however, did come out (in heavily edited form) even after Brodsky left the Soviet Union: they were published under the name of his friend Vladimir Kornilov, who agreed to pass the honorarium on to Brodsky’s parents in Leningrad (Kulle 1995: 276).24 A similar story befell Brodsky’s translations of 22. On Brodsky’s translations from Italian, see, for example: Niero 2003 and 2005; Niero e Pescatori 2008. On Brodsky’s translations from Milosz see, for example: Grudzińska-Gross 2007, Fast 2000. 23. Available online at: <www.radio.cz/ru/statja/93380>. (Accessed 5 June 2009). 24. Altogether, Brodsky translated four poems by Norvid. Two of them – “В альбом” (“W pamiętniku”) and “Песнь Тиртея” (“Pieśń Tyrteja”) – first came out under Brodsky’s name in: Kulle 1992: 204-209. The third translation – “Моя родина” (“Moja ojczyzna”) – was only recently discovered in Brodsky’s pre-emigration archive and is now published in: Brodsky 2010: 90-91. As for the fourth translation (“Посвящение,” “Dedykacja”; also published under Kor-



The poetics and politics of Joseph Brodsky as a Russian poet-translator 

Umberto Saba. Evgenii Solonovich, who was commissioned to compile a collection of Saba’s poetry as early as 1968, indicates that one of the editors, Sergei Osherov, invited Brodsky to participate in the edition and even supplied him with word-for-word translations. Six years later, in 1974, when the edition was finally completed, there was no question of publishing Brodsky’s translations under his own name, and the official translator of the eleven poems he had prepared came to be Nikolai Kotrelev, who, like Vladimir Kornilov, handed over Brodsky’s remuneration to his family. Incidentally, the same edition featured several translations from Saba under the name of David Samoilov, which in fact were prepared by another disgraced writer, Yulii Daniel (Solonovich 2000: 230–231).25

W.H. Auden and Brodsky’s conception of language Back in Norenskaia, in addition to Donne, Brodsky discovered W.H. Auden, whose work he considered, especially after emigration, to be a model of Anglo-American poetry. In April, 1970, unable to read Brodsky in the original, Auden wrote a preface to a book of his English translations.26 Two years later, on his way to America, Brodsky and Karl Proffer, a professor from the University of Michigan, where Brodsky taught during his first years in the country, visited Auden in Austria, after which they flew together to a poetry festival in London to give a reading. This first meeting with Auden, who died in 1973, became for Brodsky a sort of initiation into the new, predominantly Anglophone world that was a haven for him in the second half of his life. Auden’s influence on Brodsky’s writings, especially in the poems he composed in English, is more than obvious. Moreover, as Brodsky confessed in one of his two English essays on Auden, his very desire to start writing in English was, essentially, “to please a shadow”: “My desire to write in English [...] was simply a desire to please a shadow. Of course, where he [Auden – Y.K.] was by then, linguistic barriers hardly mattered, but somehow I thought that he might like it better if I made myself clear to him in English. (Brodsky 1986, 358).27 nilov’s name in 1972), it remains unpublished: although Kulle claimed that this translation could have been made by Brodsky because of “purely aesthetic reasons” (Kulle 1992: 289), a typescript of this text has been found among Brodsky’s papers at Yale (Beinecke Box 53, Folder 926), with the translator’s handwritten title “Iz Norvida” [from Norvid]. On Brodsky’s translations from Norvid see Venclova 2010. 25. Solonovich did not approve of the liberties Brodsky had taken in his translations from Saba; he provided Brodsky, in a private letter (undated), with his own suggestions on how to remain closer to the original (RNL, 1333, File 50). 26. Published in Brodsky 1973. 27. “To Please a Shadow.” See Brodsky’s other essay, “‘September 1, 1939’ by W.H. Auden,” in: Brodsky 1986: 304–356.

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Perhaps, the most immediate example of Brodsky’s tribute to Auden is his “Стихи на смерть Т.С. Элиота” [Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot], written in Norenskaia on January 12, 1965 (“Он умер в январе, в начале года...”) [He died at start of year, in January...]. In the Russian literary tradition, verses “on the death of a poet” are, in general, a symbolic means of establishing a line of literary inheritance (e. g., Lermontov’s “On the Death of a Poet,” dedicated to Pushkin). In Brodsky’s case, however, the tradition is somewhat widened insofar as his “Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot” commemorate a non-Russian poet and thereby extend the line of poetic inheritance beyond the confines of Russian literature. This poem in memoriam, written in the classical Western elegiac tradition, was, as Brodsky admitted, both formally and thematically modeled on Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” dated January, 1939 (“He disappeared in the dead of winter...”) – Brodsky’s text reads almost like a translation from Auden (Brodskii 2005: 20).28 Furthermore, it was, in part, via Auden’s homage to Yeats that Brodsky’s idiosyncratic conception of language, cultivated throughout his later works, originated as early as 1965. What struck Brodsky in Auden’s poem most of all was his original conception of the relationship between time and language. Although in all post-1966 editions Auden dismissed the three stanzas he had originally included in the final part of his poem, it was these stanzas that caught Brodsky’s eye back in 1965:

Time that is intolerant Of the brave and the innocent, And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique,



Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives; Pardons cowardice, conceit, Lays its honours at their feet.

(Ellman and O’Clair 1988: 742)

From these lines Brodsky concluded that since language is greater than time, because only the lesser can worship the greater (“Time [...] worships language”), language is also greater than anyone “by whom it lives,” i.e., a poet (regardless of the language s/he writes in). These lines defined Brodsky’s understanding not so much of the nature of English and Russian and how they relate to each other but, most importantly, of language as such It is not language that serves as the poet’s instrument but vice versa; the poet serves the language as a means for its endurance (in other words, it is the language itself that dictates poetry) (e.g., Brodskii 2005: 231–232). Intuitively, however, and especially after he started writing prose in English (and it is prose that gives room for such speculations), Brodsky became more and more convinced that each given language imposes a particular kind of thinking upon its speakers – a notion that has 28. See also: Bethea 1992.



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its roots in neo-Humboldtian philosophies of language, e.g., Sapir and Whorf ’s Hypothesis of Linguistic Relativity. But perhaps ever since Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Brodsky, with equal zeal, cultivated the idea that all natural languages derive from the same absolute, primary source, which, being the ultimate Ur-language, remains utterly inaccessible through the grammatical means of any given language spoken by humankind. In its extreme, this idea applies to the very notion of translatability, of which in a somewhat similar vein Walter Benjamin spoke in his famous essay “The Task of the Translator,” defining the hypothetical source of all-human speech as “pure language”: “[A]ll supra-historical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole – an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language” (Benjamin 2004: 78). Therefore, for a poet to become a polyglot in the highest sense of the word, he has to approximate this hypothetical source of all-human speech by growing mute after physical death and entering a higher order of existence – an idea that underlies both Auden’s and Brodsky’s elegies on the death of a poet. The numerous translations that Brodsky made “on demand” did not prevent him from discovering “pure” poetry that, in a sense, is already a “translation” – from the hypothetical Ur-language into a concrete tongue, regardless of its alphabet or grammar. Looking back at his first fascination with Anglo-American poetry during his northern exile, Brodsky speaks of the poetry of John Donne precisely as such a translation: from the “heavenly” into the “earthly”: У Донна [...] мне ужасно понравился этот перевод с небесного на земной... то есть перевод бесконечного в конечное. Это, как Цветаева говорила, “голос правды небесной против правды земной.” Но на самом деле не столько “против,” сколько перевод правды небесной на язык правды земной, то есть явлений бесконечных в язык конечный. (Brodskii 2005: 163) [What I most of all liked in Donne was that translation from the heavenly into the earthly... that is, a translation of the infinite into the finite. It was, as Tsvetaeva had put it, “the voice of heavenly truth against the truth of the earth.” But in fact, not so much “against,” but the translation of heavenly truth into the language of earthly truth; the translation of infinite phenomena into a finite language.]

Brodsky’s conception of language as the ultimate “original,” from which all poetry, whether Russian or English, is translated could only be crystallized via the experience of “re-translating” such “heavenly” poetry into his native Russian. Brodsky’s rendition of Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” one of the most significant undertakings on his way to formulating his conception of language, serves as yet another example:

 Yasha Klots



Время – храбрости истец, враг возвышенных сердец и зевающее от тела розовых красот, –



чтит язык и всех, кем он сущ, продлен, запечатлен, их грехи прощая им как преемникам своим. (Brodskii 2010: 43–44)

[Time, the hunter/plaintiff of bravery, / an enemy of lofty hearts, / that yawns at / the rosy bodily beauties // reveres language and everyone by whom / it exists, is prolonged and embodied, / remitting their sins / as its own successors.]

Works cited Alloi, Rada. 2008. Veselyi sputnik. Vospominaniia ob Iosife Brodskom. St. Petersburg: Zvezda. Baer, Brian. 2006. “Literary Translation and the Construction of a Soviet Intelligentsia”. The Massachusetts Review 47.3 (Fall): 537–562. Benjamin, Walter. 2004. “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens.” In The Translation Studies Reader. Second Edition, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 75–82. New York: Routledge. Bethea, David. 1994. Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. –—. 1992. “Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky’s ‘Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot.” PMLA 107 2 (March). 232–245. Brodskii, Iosif. 2005. Kniga interview. Sost. Valentina Polukhina. Moskva: Zakharov. –—. 2010. Izgnanie iz raia. Izbrannye perevody, edited by Yakov Klots, introduction by Larisa Stepanova. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka. Brodsky, Joseph. 1973. Selected Poems. Trans. by George L. Kline. Foreword by W. H. Auden. New York: Harper & Row. –—. 1986. Less Than One. Selected Essays. New York: FSG. Ellmann, Richard and O’Clair, Robert. 1988. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd edition. New York & London: WW Norton. Etkind, Efim. 1978. Notes of a Non-Conspirator. Trans. Peter France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. –—. 1988. Protsess Iosifa Brodskogo. London: Overseas Publication Interchange Ltd. Fast, Petr. 2000. “Brodskii kak kritik i perevodchik Milosha.” Russian Literature XLVII: 331–344. Gordin, Yakov. 2001. “Nashe delo – pochti antropologicheskoe.” In V ozhidanii varvarov. Mirovaia poeziia v perevodakh Iosifa Brodskogo. Sankt-Peterburg: Zvezda. Grudzińska-Gross, Irena. 2007. Miłosz i Brodski: pole magnetyczne; wstęp Tomas Venclova. Kraków: Znak. Ivanov, V.V. 1988. “O Dzhone Donne i Iosife Brodskom.” Inostrannaia Literatura 9: 180–181. –—. 1997. “Brodskii i metafizicheskaia poeziia.” Zvezda 1: 194-199. Kline, George L. 1965. “Elegy for John Donne.” Russian Review 24: 341–353.



The poetics and politics of Joseph Brodsky as a Russian poet-translator  Kulle, Viktor. 1992. Introduction. In Brodskii, Iosif. 1992. Bog sokhraniaet vse. Moskva: “Mif ”. –—. 1995. “‘Tam, gde oni konchili, ty nachinaesh…’ (o perevodakh Iosifa Brodskogo).” Russian Literature XXXVII: 267–288. –—. 1999. “‘Demon’ Nabokova i ‘Nebozhitel’” Brodskogo.” Staroe literaturnoe obozrenie 2: 86–88. Loseff, Lev. 1990. “Politics/Poetics.” In Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, edited by Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina, 34–55. London: Macmillan Press. –—. 2006. Iosif Brodskii. Opyt literaturnoi biografii. Moskva: Molodaia gvardiia. Lubimov, Yuri. 2001. Rasskazy starogo trepacha. Moskva: Novosti. Niero, Alessandro. 2003. “‘...V glukhonemom uglu Severnoi Adriatiki...’: Iosif Brodskii i Umberto Saba.” In Poetika Iosifa Brodskogo, edited by V.P. Polukhina, I.V. Fomenko, A.G. Stepanov, 357–365. Tver: Tverskoi gosudarstvennyi universitet. –—. 2005. “Iosif Brodskii i Salvatore Kvazimodo.” In Iosif Brodskii: strategii chteniia, edited by V. Polukhina, A. Korchinskii, Yu. Troitskii, 328–340. Moskva: Izdatelstvo Ippolitova. Niero, Alessandro e Pescatori, Sergio. 2008. L’arte del Possibile: Iosif Brodskij poeta traduttore di autori del Novecento italioano (Quasimodo, Bassani, Govoni, Fortini, De Libero e Saba). Venezia: Cafoscarina. Pervushina, E.A. “Dzhon Donn i Iosif Brodskii: tvorcheskie pereklichki (‘Bol’shaia Elegiia Dzhonu Donnu’ Iosifa Brodskogo).” Available online at: [http://spintongues.msk.ru/Pervushina3.htm.] (Accessed 5 June 2009). Sergeev, Andrei. 1997. Omnibus. Albom dlia marok, portrety, o Brodskom, rasskazy. Moskva: NLO. Shaitanov, Igor. 1998. “Uravnenie s dvumya neizvestnymi.” Voprosy literatury 6: 3–39. Solonovich, Evgenii. 2000. “Pod chuzhim imenem. Istoriia publikatsii perevodov Brodskogo iz Saby.” NLO 45: 230–231. Varshavskii, Yuri. 1998. “Protokol vyezdnogo zasedaniia Dzerzhinskogo narodnogo suda po delu I.A. Brodskogo, obvinennogo v tuneiadstve.” In I. Brodskii: tvorchestvo, lichnost, sudba. Itogi 3-x konferentsii, 275–287. Sankt-Peterburg: Zvezda. Venclova, Tomas. 2010. “Iosif Brodskii – perevodchik Norvida.” In Dar i krest. Pamiati Natalii Trauberg, edited by E. Rabinovich and M. Chepaitite, 339-367. Saint Petersburg: Ivana Limbakha.

Squandered opportunities On the uniformity of literary translations in postwar Hungary László Scholz

Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary This chapter opens with a brief historical overview of the reasons behind the striking uniformity of literary translations from Spanish into Hungarian (scarcity of translators, asymmetrical cultural relations, strong prewar translation canon), and then offers a detailed picture of the ideology, theory, and practice of translating literature under communism. A great number of examples and statistics, taken mainly from modern Latin American fiction, suggests why translations played a key role in promoting this fiction, why uniformity was inevitable, and finally, why planned art is always old fashioned.

During the second half of the twentieth century, literary translation in Hungary reached an age of unequivocal distinction, as evidenced by the relevant lists of titles, languages, and printings (Bart 2000: 47–50, 64–67); the quantity and geographical amplitude of these translations, however, was not accompanied by a corresponding variety in method.1 One need only glance through a few Latin American narrative texts, the body of which is the focus of this analysis, to notice the surprising uniformity of translations into Hungarian; authors as different as García Márquez, Borges, J.M. Arguedas, and Barnet appear to share an unexpected stylistic affinity. Why was the strategy of minorization seldom introduced or encouraged? Why is there so little evidence of what Lawrence Venuti termed the remainder? Why did Hungarian translators appear to be unconscious of such subversive channels as indigenous language, self-reflective discourse, heterogeneity, or asymmetry? In theory, the conditions for such approaches were all there. In the field, translations of Latin American texts into Hungarian were still largely without precedent; at the same time, within the literary institution, anything Latin American represented a kind of “blank check”

1.

Special thanks to Karen Wilfred who helped in the translation of this article.

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for its publication, since it represented a politically important sector – the so-called Third World. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, but I will examine only three; these will lead to a more detailed analysis of a fourth reason, which is still not completely understood in this context. The first reason is undoubtedly the scarcity of experienced translators. During the prewar period, Spanish did not carry any weight in Hungary among foreign languages; it was not taught in the secondary schools, and there was no department of Spanish functioning in the country, nor were there dictionaries or suitable literary histories. The first postwar translators were polyglots whose language abilities included Spanish, but they lacked a deep understanding of the Spanish-speaking world. They worked by means of other Romance languages, such as French or Italian, and often Latin itself. In most cases they shared very traditional ideas about literary translation, basing their praxis primarily on producing poetic works from the classical world and from the Western canon. This lack of translators also led to the appearance of monolithic voices who created a surprising uniformity among different works by the same writer or among different authors and poets. Pablo Neruda’s vast body of work, for example, contains a variety of different elements, but according to György Somlyó’s translation, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada [Twenty love poems and a song of dispair], Las uvas y el viento [The Grapes and the Wind], and Odas elementales [Elemental Odes] all appear to have the same tone; the translator Endre Gáspár, in turn, homogenized poets as disparate as Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, and Nicolás Guillén. Another factor can be identified in the particular dynamic that tended to characterize the contacts between peripheral literatures. When these peripheral literatures came into direct contact with one another, they were not connected on their own terms but rather in terms of what they represented to their respective regional centers, which resulted in considerable misunderstandings. The example of the Hungarian Zsigmond Remenyik, as explored previously (Scholz 2004/2006: 157–159), reveals that the poet’s texts in Spanish, marginal in more than one sense, were accepted and published by a vanguardist group in Chile as the best of the new literature from the European center (162–163); in the opposite direction, his later texts written in Hungarian about the Latin American experience were altered by Remenyik himself to fulfill the criterion for thematic exoticism and to align with the prevailing concept of canonized literature in the magazine Nyugat. To put this in the terms of Evan-Zohar’s polysystems theory, the encounter between the two marginal groups did not serve to minorize any aspect of the center but rather served merely to connect them more closely to their own majoritarian centers. The magazine Nyugat undoubtedly represents and produced the third and most important factor, as well as the most lasting effects in the field of translation in twentieth-century Hungary. In fact, since its founding in 1908, the Nyugat generation of translators developed and established a concept of translation that aimed to eliminate any indication of the relationship between the original texts and their translations, in



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order to make the original author disappear and to elevate the translations to the status of autonomous texts within the sphere of Hungarian literature (Józan: 422–426). This attitude evidently led to a marked literarization of translations, placing the emphasis on the act of creation rather than transformation. The individual volumes of translation published by Kosztolányi, Babits, Tóth, and other poets of the decade between 1910 and 1920 are a testament to this process, which created a rapidly canonized paradigm that was maintained for decades. The first translators of Spanish American texts after World War II inherited this concept of translation and cultivated it, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the first decade of the postwar period, an understandable phenomenon due to the aforementioned factors. But even so, how did this mentality come to dominate almost monolithically for at least forty to fifty years? Were there no changes produced in these aesthetic paradigms as a result of the violent socio-political transformations? Naturally, the literary institution did not remain intact, as is made clear enough by the declaration of the omnipotence of so-called socialist realism and by the elimination of all private publishing houses in the country. But beyond such measures, what other forces affected the literary institution and, within it, the field of translation? First, the all-powerful principle that defined the arts from the close of the 1940s was the same as that which characterized the relations of power and economy: maximized and massive concentration. Everything was organized and manipulated vertically, assigning artist and artwork their appropriate spaces, such that, according to Miklós Haraszti (45), they formed part of the Organization, of the Great Work. There was no ambivalence, detour, or desire left unfulfilled; the artist served the interest of society, and this, in turn, gave him resources and prestige. In fact, every detail of his activities was organized: “artists’ retreats” were organized for writers and translators, public spaces were designated for the works of sculptors, contests were organized to seek out “talented youth,” sale networks for books were set up in factories, national prizes were awarded, etc. In the case of literature, following nationalization only a few publishing houses were created, along with a few journals – all belonging to the state – and each of these was assigned an area to cover, such as contemporary literature, foreign texts, or children’s books. Managers were appointed according to political considerations by the respective ministers or committees of the Party. Beyond paper quotas, there were no other economic factors that influenced their work; the price of books did not depend on the print runs. Such concentration was brutal: in 1938, there were more than a hundred publishing houses that published almost 2500 titles in some nine million copies, a level that was reached once again at the end of the 1950s but produced by ten times fewer publishing houses (Bart 2000: 48–49). The editorial mechanism worked with great political efficiency and with much help from so that the artists (Haraszti: 43–44) their goal of producing a unitary and unequivocal concept of Art was quickly reached. If art was an instrument for the creation of the New Man, how could the state ensure that works of art would carry out their ideological function? Although different forms of control existed – for example, the Kiadói Főigazgatóság [Directorate General

 László Scholz

of Publications] that functioned between 1954 and 1989 – self-censorship was also operative in a form that became purely automatic. Directors, organizers, publishers, editors and even translators knew the boundaries they were working within; they wrote their reports, proposals, prologues, and reviews according to these expectations, and they instinctively recognized the criteria of the famous three categories established after the 1956 revolution: tiltás, tűrés, támogatás [prohibite, tolerate, support]. Literary translations formed an integral part of this system although hardly any specific decrees were issued regarding the publication of foreign texts, except in 1971 (Bart 2000: 9–10). Certain subjects were preferred, and meetings were held at regular intervals to select works to be translated from the literatures of the “brotherly countries” – above all, those of the Soviet Union. But as evidenced by the small number of exceptions (Bart 2000: 76–77), literary translations were subjected to foreign policy considerations even beyond mere censorship. The mechanism for selecting titles was very efficient, producing a relatively low number of unwise decisions or “scandals” and contributing to the creation of an image of art and the artist that, by definition, worked solely for the common good of society (Haraszti: 44). The unquestionable social function of art carried evident consequences. No effort could exist to produce works of l’art pour l’art, playful, experimental or self-reflective texts removed from the pre-established goal; there was no room left for attempts at artistic innovations and changes of genre. The other fundamental requirement was clarity. An artistic work that contained elements that were difficult to define or understand were considered unpublishable, first by the aforementioned organs of control, and then by the artists themselves, who, with time, came to practice self-censorship without hesitation. The lack of a straightforward and accessible message could call into question not only the intrinsic value of the work but also the possibility of controlling its effect. There was a well thought-out strategy in place for dealing with the few exceptions that arose. Either the innovative work could be limited to a certain restricted sphere, or it was ascribed a delayed effect (Bart 2000: 63–65), that is, the publication of such works was intentionally delayed in order to weaken their effect. There could be irony, and there could be fantastic, grotesque, or circular elements, but only in an embedded form that not only defined the overall meaning of the work but also provided its own feasible explanation on one level or another. Foreign trends could be followed as long as they were kept at a certain temporal distance and were recontextualized according to principles in place at the time. As a direct consequence of this attitude, there was an exaggerated attention to the classics. Statistical data indicates, for example, that in the case of translated literature, the number of classic or canonical works was surpassed only by the texts of the socalled socialist countries (Bart 2000: 83). The classics offer authority, continuity, legitimacy, and education for the people, and, above all, they efficiently restrict the notion of progress. Reviewing the postwar lists of titles, twentieth-century avant-garde writers were included as an exception; it is clear that the publication of the classics flourished at the expense of more contemporary and innovative texts.



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To add one more contributing factor, there was the phenomenon of literarization, and not only in literature. In fact, literary art in postwar Hungary was attributed a status similar to the one it enjoyed in the nineteenth-century at the height of Hungarian nationalism, as indicated, for example, by poems canonized in and by the schools, linear narratives published in unbelievable print-runs, didactic films, and television series. The impulse to “write well,” as expressed in forms taken from traditional molds and understood in terms of stylistic “classicism,” are in reality the inevitable consequence of the concept of art and directed art that values content over form (Haraszti: 44). Where does translated literature fit within these parameters? Throughout the twentieth century, it played an undoubtedly protagonistic role. Foreign literature offered many possibilities within in the structure described above. It could contribute to the common good, represent tradition, fill the vacuum left by the absence of contemporary texts, and – with an edition of minimal circulation – could show foreign critics of the regime the modernity and freedom of the national culture. The data are impressive (Bart 2000: 64–65, 114–199): between 1945 and 1987, no less than 45% of literary books were translated works (13,053 titles in comparison with Hungarian texts, which numbered 15,988); this figure is even higher at the level of printings (52%). A review of the annual statistics reveals that the highest numbers coincide with or follow the most difficult political periods: in 1949, the proportion is 48.5%, 56% in 1950, and 55% from 1957–1959. The distribution of titles by geographic zones is also revealing. Between 1945 and 1959, 1,214 Soviet works were translated, 325 works from the “brotherly countries,” and 1,364 from other languages, which included English, French, and German. To ensure and encourage the translation of a sufficient number of works from those countries that were politically in favor, meetings were held in which representatives exchanged lists of recommended titles, planned co-edited works or series, presented encyclopedias or collections, provided current materials for magazines, etc. In the first decades of the postwar period, such cooperation did not present major problems, although later on difficulties arose with double or triple control – for example, when it was no longer possible to maintain the proportion of Soviet titles, or when the East Germans protested against the publication of certain authors from the West. The importance of translations in ensuring an adequate presence of classic texts for the reading public is equally striking. According to the calculations of István Bart, nearly half of the literary publications in Hungary in the first decades of the post-war period were works by classic authors (97), a proportion that surely exceeds the numbers one would find during the same period in Western countries. The selection was carried out once again according to the methods described above; naturally, the preference went to authors from the East, Marxists, and leftists from the West, but beginning in the 1960s, we see the lists begin to include a wider range of writers, excluding only those authors who were openly experimental or anticommunist. Truly incredible lists were produced in this way, lists that included H.G. Wells, along with Dürrenmatt, or Sartre, Jack London and Thomas Mann. As large-scale state projects, collections of classics were put together which even today are surprising for their breadth. For

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example, in 1963 the publishing house Európa initiated a series called A Világirodalom Remekei [Master Works of World Literature], which included no fewer than 200 titles published within ten years and in an unbelievable number of print-runs. (There were some novels published in circulations of up to two hundred thousand; more than a hundred thousand copies were sold of El perseguidor, an anthology of the Spanish American novella.) Needless to say, the literature belonged primarily to the grandparents’ generation (the one exception was Ernest Hemingway, the most popular author among foreign writers) and consisted of a subtle mix of bourgeois, humanist, and socialist authors (Bart 2000: 90–92). With time other projects developed, and modern collections were successfully planned that, although with significantly reduced circulations, gradually changed Hungarians’ outlook on world literature. For example, beginning in 1976 the number of Anglophone authors translated into Hungarian exceeded the number of Soviet authors, and in 1984 there were already two times as many English or American writers as Russians being translated into Hungarian – but this is another story, one perhaps no less monolithic than the one at hand. And what was the fate of Latin American literature in this context? Since there was no tradition of Latin American literature in Hungarian, the first translations that appeared were justified by political motives; in the period from 1948 to 1956, only six Latin American authors were translated into Hungarian: Revueltas, Icaza, Neruda, Guillén, Varela, and Fallas, all of them of the same leftist orientation. The subsequent shift was also provoked by political factors, specifically the Cuban revolution and the expansionist policies of the Soviet Union. Given that the Latin American boom was an artificial formation designed and maintained by, among others, the large publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic, the lasting growth and popularity of this literature in Hungary was likewise not the fruit of spontaneous development but rather of a welldevised plan. As one can read in a Party decree from 1975 and in István Bart’s book cited above, the presence of the new Latin American literature in Hungary was attributable not to desire to translate works that were bestsellers in the West, but rather to the political motive to “direct the attention of the reading public not to Western bourgeois texts, but to the non-European literature that was growing...in the Third World” (Bart 2000: 82–83). If we review the list of works translated from Spanish American literature (Scholz 2005: 300), it is evident that selection on the grounds of ideology functioned with a reasonable degree of efficiency. As might be expected, there is a notable presence of works by Cuban authors, such as Nicolás Guillén, Alejo Carpentier, Edmundo Desnoes, Lisandro Otero, Onerlio Jorge Cardoso, César López, Fayad Jamís, Antón Arrufat, and Eliseo Diego, but nothing, or next to nothing, by Cabrera Infante or Lezamo Lima. This list is uneven in itself, but then there are also those Cuban authors who probably never dreamed they would have the good fortune to see their works appear in Hungarian; for example, Aventuras del soldado desconocido [Adventures of the Unknown Soldier] by Pablo de la Torrente Brau, or Memorias de una cubanita que nació con el siglo [Memoirs of a Cuban Girl born with the Century] by Renée Méndez Capote,



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or La vuelta de Chencho [Chench’s Return] by Carlos Enríquez. Who would recognize any of these authors even in Latin America itself? Texts from South America arrived first from Puig, Bendetti, and Roa Bastos, and later from Cortázar, Onetti, Bioy Casares, and Sabato, while Borges did not come to be known until 1972, and even then camouflaged as an author of science fiction; Mexican authors included Rulfo, Ibargüengoitia, Fuentes, and, of course, Octavio Paz. The sacred cows were established early on: first, Neruda, for obvious reasons, then Asturias (the two published an unfortunate book about their culinary experiences in Hungary, Comiendo en Hungría [Sentimental Journey around Hungarian Cuisine]), and later García Márquez and Vargas Llosa. The principal of political selection carried over into canonized literature as well. At present, the translated works of Cortázar have not included any of his books of avant-guardist experimentation, and Vargas Llosa’s Historia de Mayta [The real life of Alejandro Mayta] was not translated until 1997 due to its anti-Soviet references – or, according to the report at the time, because “its translation into Hungarian would hurt the interests of foreign politics in our country.” García Márquez’s early journalism was ignored for years because it included articles written about his visit to Hungary in 1957. Among essayists, an emphasis was placed on cultural (Arciniegas), anthropological, or testimonial (Manzano, Fernando Ortiz, López Portillo, Miguel Barnet, Lydia Cabrera) approaches, as well as on those texts with evident political applications (Mariátegui). Hardly anything appeared from essayists such as Mallea, Vasconcelos, Zambrano, or Zea. Creating a greater body of Hispanic classics remained impossible, but there was the intention of doing so, as evidenced by the publication of independent volumes of texts by Martí and Bolívar, the great telluric novels of Gallegos Güiraldes, and Rivera, and collections of myths and legends, among them the Popol Vuh, a sacred book of the quiché Mayans. We have access to a rich source of information that has been studied little up until now: the internal reports of publishing houses of the time. These reveal the overall mentality, as well as the arguments and justifications that were used (or abused) in the selection of works to be published. The romantic-exotic element appears to predominate in references to Latin America. Addressing the roots of Neruda’s poetry, they refer to the “strange climate, the southernmost spots of South America, the picturesque world of the feelings and images of his people”; speaking of El Señor Presidente [The President], they emphasize that the work “makes us see intensely the exhuberance of the tropical jungle, the wild beauty of the country, the narrow streets of the village, its buildings and its life”; speaking of La casa verde [The Green House], they affirm that “its force of attraction is in allowing us to experience a distant and unknown world. Its artistic value is inferior to its sociographic values. If it were not appealing for its exoticism, its defects would be more obvious.” The topos of exoticism in Latin American literature is so deeply rooted that one reviewer, not finding it in the fiction of Borges (and, for this reason, not recommending it for translation), declared that “these leaps [the bold detours from the principal subject matter] do not seem particularly interesting; rather than developing the subject, they make it quite dry.” (Exoticism did not

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always lead to translation, however, given that the aforementioned criterion of clarity sometimes canceled it out, or at least neutralized it; according to one of the editors, there is an already proven method that consists of “simplification, objectification, decomposition of apparently confusing images, and fortunate condensation.”) In their negative appraisals, the reviewers vehemently criticized the works that showed any sign of straying from the sacrosanct realism. When speaking of Asturias, the reviewer states explicitly that El Señor Presidente will only affect the Hungarian reader through its strong poetic expressionism, which “we cannot be interested in supporting or propagating in our country today.” In the rejection of the translation of Modelo 62 para armar [62: A Model Kit], the key phrase is this: “Free association is already a broken record; Cortázar is pursuing absolute freedom” – which, the reviewer continues, is probably the aesthetic reflection of the sympathy the author feels for any type of guerrillas, Tupamaros, and terrorists. In the case of Vargas Llosa, he earns praise for the narrative technique in La casa verde, but his work receives the most dangerous label, that of l’art pour l’art, in order to condemn without delay the author’s “interior neutrality.” La tía Julia [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter], on the other hand, could be translated because the structural tricks did not detract from “the dense traditional veins of the work.” Even the surrealism of Canto General needed a defense (and it had to be defended because it had already been given the green light for publication due to political considerations); it was argued that “what we superficially called surrealism before cannot, in fact, be described as such and proceeds only in part from the effects of the decadent bourgeois tendencies; on the contrary, it is derived also in part, and more fundamentally, from the national and popular roots of the poetry of Neruda.” Another little studied source presents itself in anthologies of translations. These always reveal pertinent characteristics of the literary discourse of a given age because they reunite and reterritorialize texts that are already published in other spheres, and they show, as much through the selection criteria as through the imposed framework, whether the inherent intention is to reinforce or to question the domestic canons (Gerlin: 360–361). In this corpus, the mere quantity of anthologies calls for attention, for between 1957 and 1989 no fewer than thirty-two collections were published, which means that every fourth or fifth book of Latin American literature (32: 139) fell into this category. There were selections by genre (short story, poetry, theater, essay), by geographic or national zones (Cuba, Perú, Chile, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Paraguay), and by subject (historical, political, romance). Such a proportion is well justified by the special situation of Latin American texts in Hungary, which, as we have seen, lacked a tradition, but it also indicated that there was a willingness on the part of editors to propagate certain ideas and, above all, to homogenize the corpus. If we review the selections, especially the titles, subtitles, prologues, and biographies of the authors included, we find a surprising uniformity, in which the reigning principles are those described above. In the case of literary anthologies, the selection is more balanced; although a few authors appear who would be unpublishable in independent volumes (Lezama Lima, Cabrera Infante), there are no – nor could there be – any writers present



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who represent the avant-garde (Felisberto Hernández, Macedonio Fernández, Pablo Palacio), nor are there any representatives of a noticeably conservative ideology. The general tone of the translations corresponds to the system of aesthetics in place at the time, which involved equalizing genres, periods, and authors in a supposedly harmonic unity; in the majority of cases, heterogeneity was limited to the lexical level without allowing subversiveness to enter into the canonized literary discourse. Those anthologies compiled according to political criteria follow this model, the one difference being that the literarization is unequal and ideology appears in every possible aspect. In the prologues editors insist on the revolutionary character of the continent or on the political affinity those countries share with the countries of the East in the construction of a new society – and, naturally, they insist that their perspective offers a faithful representation of the respective literatures (see the following anthologies: Kígyóölő ének [Song to Kill a Snake], Ösvény a hegyoldalban [Path on the Hillside], Cápauszonyok [Shark Flappers]). When reading through the mini-biographies of the authors, it becomes clear that the inclusion of the anthologized writers had to be justified not only with the works they had published or the prizes they had earned, but much more so by the social or political positions they had held. For example, in the anthology of short stories Harci dal három ütemben [A Three-beat Military Song], the writer’s field of work in mentioned in all but two cases; naturally, these authors held political positions in state institutions (editorial offices, embassies, museums, radio, etc.), doubly guaranteeing their inclusion in the anthology. The titles of the published works also reflect this attitude. They tend in general toward literarization and, when possible, they place emphasis on the exotic and on political affiliation. The aforementioned anthology of Cuban short stories (Harci dal három ütemben) fulfills this last requirement, as does the anthology of Latin American poetry Fegyverek szomorú éjszakája [The Sad Night of Weaponry], and the anthology of Nicaraguan texts that appeared under the title Sandino fiai [Sons of Sandino]. One of the first texts translated into Hungarian in 1948 was El luto humano [Human Mourning], by Revueltas, and the title could not be more ominous: Köröznek a keselyűk [Circling Vultures]. The stylistic audacity produced truly singular gems, such as a volume of Donoso entitled Csapjunk egy nagy murit [A Grand Party]. Touristic clichés resound in Inkák és konkisztádorok [Incas and Conquistadors:], Sasok és kondorkeselyűk [Eagles and Condors: Precolumbian Literature in Nahua and Quechua], and Kreol rumba [Creole Rumba: A Cuban Anthology]. The most characteristic example, however, can be found in a famous and controversial work of Cuban testimonials, Biografía de un cimarrón [Biography of a Runaway Slave] by Miguel Barnet; the Hungarian version appeared with the title Fekete sors az Antillák gyöngyén [Dark Fate in the Pearl of the Antilles], a truly “testimonial” title with respect to the falsifications of Barnet’s original text. Incidentally, this title has a previous history in the English-speaking world, since the first version there was translated as The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, which carries its own political intent, as analyzed previously (Scholz 2004: 64–66), changing biography into autobiography.

 László Scholz

Finally, some textual examples show how the principles described above were put into practice. The most common linguistic-stylistic taboo in Hungarian literature of the postwar period was the use of obscenities, vulgarities, and indecent slang. Such language was ignored or, in the majority of cases, substituted with more decent or euphemistic phrases according to the clichés of “good writing,” evidence of the general tendency toward literarization and of the monolithic imposition of an official taste. In one of the first Latin American novels translated into Hungarian, Fallas’s Mamita yunai, one encounters very colloquial language peppered with local slang. Such words as “jodido” [fucking], “pendejada” [crap], and “carajos” [bastard] appear quite frequently; in the Hungarian translation, however, there is no evidence of their literal meaning or their stylistic register. On the contrary, the text is raised to a level of decency with surprising creativity. To replace “carajo,” equivalents such as “semmirekellő” [good-for-nothing], “nyavalyás”[potty], “az angyalát” [by Jove], and “a kutya mindenit” [damn] were employed (13, 17, 21, 97, 98). The literarization is doubly in error when the word “calajo” is used to mimic the speech of a Chinese character, and the translator simply puts (21) “fene egye meg” [damn it]:

(1) Ayel templano pasó la gente pa lentlo. Esto ta mu lalgo, calajo. ¡Uf! ¡Mu lalgo! [Yestelday the folks depalted eally. This’s vely long, bastald. Uf! Vely long!] Jó kolán indultak a többiek. Nagyon messze van, a fene egye meg, nagyon messze! [The others set out very eally. It is very far, damn it. Very far!] Or, on the same page:

(2) Látima, calajo, pelo sin plata etá jolilo.” [It’s a pity, bastard, but he’s fucked up without money.] Kál, hogy nincs pénze, pedig anélkül rosszul áll a szénája. [It is a pity he has not got any money, without it he is badly off.] This stylistic treatment continues in a similar manner even with less “potent” words: (3) se las metía [las hojas] en el seno [he put the (leaflets) in her bosom] [a röplapokat] blúzába dugta [he put the (leaflets) in her blouse]

(4) Ya viene el pago, pa que dejés de estarte masturbando. [This is the punishment that you should stop masturbating.] Ez a fizetség azért, hogy nem jössz velünk a lányokhoz. [This is the fine for not coming with us to see the girls.] A similar phenomenon appears in the translation of El luto humano from the very beginning. The novel’s epigraph is a verse by Alberto Quintero Álvarez:

(5) Porque la muerte es infinitamente un acto de amor. [Because death is an act of infinite lovemaking] Mert a halál olyan, mint a szerelem. [Because death is like love.]



Squandered opportunities 

The same applies to a description in the opening of the novel:

(6) Su mujer, junto a la camita, volvió el rostro hacia él con una expresión aguda, inteligente de pesar. [His wife, right by the tiny bed, turned her face towards him with a keen, understanding expression of grief.] Az asszony a gyerekre nézett, szomorú, mélységes mély szemeivel. [The woman looked at the child with her sad, profoundly profound eyes.] Here the translator not only eliminates a good part of the sentence, but also, through the emphatic and alliterative phrasing “mélységes mély,” creates an allusion to a famous Hungarian translation of the first sentence of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, the style of which has nothing to do with El luto humano. The ideological and racial references are also fully controlled. The Republic of China, in Mamita yunai, is naturally translated “correctly” as “Kínai Népköztársaság” [the People’s Republic of China]. In the previously mentioned novel by Fallas, the words “negro,” “negrito,” “negro criollo,” and “moreno” are translated without distinction as “néger” [negro] or else simply omitted altogether. In Revueltas’s El luto humano, it is even more striking to see that “ludovikás” is used to describe a Mexican soldier in 1948 Hungary:

(7) El aludido era un joven militar de carrera. [The person referred to was a young career army officer.] A megszólított ludovikás volt. [The person he addressed was a graduate from Ludovika (which was the most important military academy of prewar Hungary, so after the war it was associated with reactionary political forces)] Neither does one see any attempt to stray from the canonical norms on a syntactic level; the “irregularities” are almost always corrected. In Mamita yunai, there is an Anglophone negrito whose speech includes a smattering of Spanish phrases, such as “Yo tiene” [I has] or “Yo estar,” [I to be], “pasiano” [paseando: visiting], “jabla,” [habla: speak], “joye,” [oye: listen], which are translated into Hungarian in their standard verb forms.

(8) Yo tiene la mía y tiene trabajo en Panamá; sólo pasiano pa poquitos días in imón. Yo estar anoche in el mitin y joya jabla cuestión Talamanca. ¿Y usté caminar Talamanca? [I has mine and I has job in Panama; only visitin fo few days in Limón. Last night I to be at the meeting and heared speek Talamanca question.] Nekem már megvan az igazolványom és munkám is van Panamában; csak néhány napot Limónban töltöttem. Ma éjjel gyűlésen voltam és Talamancáról hallottam beszélni. Ön Talamancába megy. [I already got my pass, and I also got a job in Panama; I only spent a few days in Limón. Tonight I attended a meeting and I heard how they discussed the issue at Talamanca.] The same occurs when some Indians speak Spanish, leaving off the predicates: “Agua peligrosa” [Dangerous water] is translated as “A víz erre igen veszélyes” [The water is

 László Scholz

very dangerous here], “Yo quiere ir momentito” [I wants to leave for one minute] as “Egy pillanatra lemegyek,” [I leave for a minute] and “Indio pobre no tene medicina” [Poor Indian hav no medication] as “A szegény indiánoknak nincsen orvosságuk” [The poor Indians have no medication]. To return to the initial question as to the uniformity of postwar literary translations in Hungary, it would appear that beyond the three factors enumerated at the outset, the fourth, which has been explored over the last several pages, turns out to be the most relevant. Translated literature came to play a protagonistic role in the postwar period not because of its intrinsic values; rather it was used to fill the artificial vacuum created in communist countries by requiring authors to pursue specific political objectives. The phenomena identified in the literary institution (massive concentration, ideological selection, contentism, literarization, clarity, delayed effects, insistence on the classics) led inevitably to a uniformization of the translations and established a conservative attitude that left no room for innovation or experimentation. The aesthetic construct of the postwar political regime coincided at more than one point with the previous paradigm, and far from neutralizing or transforming the canon of literary translations from prior decades, it reinforced it, extending its validity for another half a century. This explains the curious fact of literary history that, while the boom was spread and supported in other countries (for example, in the United States), elevating the “modernistic” elements of these literary works in order to counteract the influence of social texts with a leftist affiliation (Larsen: 772–774) or to introduce, as in Spain, works that would break through the petrified canon of a sacrosanct realism, in postwar Hungary the same literature was used to exclude modernity. This phenomenon not only explains the uniformity and lack of minorization in the translations of Latin American texts into Hungarian but also reveals an important aspect of the postwar political system. Planned art is by nature old-fashioned and leaves no space free of its control, not even within the margins.

Works cited Bart, István. 2000. Világirodalom és könyvkiadás a Kádár-korszakban. [World Literature and Book Publishing in the Kádár Era] Budapest: Scholastica. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1972. Körkörös romok. Budapest: Kozmosz. Fallas, Carlos Luis. 1955. Mamita yunai. Trans. Mátyás Horányi. Budapest: Új magyar könyvkiadó. García Márquez, Gabriel. 2003. “Magyarországon jártam (1957 novembere)”, [I Have Been to Hungary (November 1957)], “Nagy Imre hős vagy áruló (1958 júniusa)”. [Imre Nagy, Hero or Traitor (June 1958)] Nagyvilág 48.11: 884–896. Gerling, Vera Elizabeth. 2005. “Antología y traducción: modos de leer el cuento latinaomericano en traducción alemana.” Estudios 25: 359–383. György, Hargitai (ed). 1966. Cápauszonyok. Kubai elbeszélések. Budapest: Európa, Haraszti, Miklós. 1987. The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism. New York: Basic Books. Jozan, Ildikó. 2003. “Irodalom és fordítás” [Literature and Translation]. Literatúra 4: 424–426.



Squandered opportunities  Kígyóölő ének. Latin-Amerika irodalmi és politikai antológiája. 1973. Budapest: Kozmosz. Lajos, Horváth (ed). 1978. Ösvény a hegyoldalban. Kubai Antológia. Budapest: KISZ Pest megyei Bizottság. Larsen, Neil. 1992. “The ‘Boom’ Novel and the Cold War in Latin America.” Modern Fiction Studies 38.3: 771–784. Revueltas, José. 1948. Köröznek a keselyűk. Trans. Emil Hartai. Budapest: Szikra. Rodríguez, Félix Pita. 1978. Harci dal három ütemben. Mai kubai elbeszélők. Budapest: Európa. Scholz, László. 2005. A spanyol-amerikai irodalom története [A History of Spanish-American Literature]. Budapest: Gondolat –—. 2004. “Variaciones canónicas.” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 651/652: 57–66. –—. 2004/6. “Periferia vs periferia: el caso de Zsigmond Remenyik, poeta húngaro en la vanguardia chileno-peruana.” Estudios 24/25: 157–175.

Meaningful absences Byron in Bulgarian Vitana Kostadinova

University of Plovdiv, Plovdiv, Bulgaria This chapter builds on the presence of Byron in Bulgaria in order to examine his absence with regard to the literary and historical contexts of the recipient culture. Part one focuses on Byron’s non-appearance in the period of the Bulgarian Revival; part two elaborates on The Giaour, A Fragment of a Turkish Tale and its non-existant Bulgarian translation; part three discusses the Socialist oblivion of Manfred, once the most popular Byronic poem in Bulgaria. This chapter suggests that the absence of translations in a given culture can speak as loudly as the translations themselves.

Introduction Binary oppositions come in handy when, in an attempt to bring order to the chaos of literary ideas, critics label and categorize. In the process they may show a marked preference for imagination and feelings, or else for experience and understanding; they may accentuate the lyric flow and marginalize satire, or vice versa; they may juxtapose prose and verse or choose between historicizing and aestheticizing. This either-or approach does not seem to do justice to the diversity of Romanticism, however. In M. H. Abrams’ seminal survey of tradition and revolution in Romantic literature, Byron is omitted altogether “because in his greatest work he speaks with an ironic counter-voice and deliberately opens a satirical perspective on the vatic stance of his Romantic contemporaries” (Abrams 1973: 13). In a diachronic perspective the canon is undoubtedly dynamic: challenging Abrams’ verdict, Jerome McGann argues that Byron is “perhaps the single most important figure in the history of European Romanticism” (McGann 1985: 27). Nevertheless, at any moment of time, the canon can be defined in terms of presences and absences. The importation of foreign poets and writers is linked to canon formation: it involves a selection of texts and, more often than not, translations that represent a part rather than the whole body of an author’s writing. This is certainly true of the translations of Byron’s legacy into Bulgarian. This essay explores the Bulgarian

 Vitana Kostadinova

relationship to Byron in order to isolate three examples of his absence and to examine them within the literary and historical contexts of the recipient culture.

Horizons of expectations In the Bulgarian Revival period, cultural, social and historical processes were subordinated to the aspiration to break free from the Ottoman Empire.1 This, of course, reflected the priorities of a national literature, but it also affected the appropriation of foreign texts. Thus, the Bulgarian reception of Byron is not just a literary phenomenon. Naturally, such manifestations of reception as translations, citations, dedications, etc. are primarily considered in view of Byron’s presence in Bulgarian culture. In cultural analysis, however, the lack of a text is no less meaningful than the availability of a text. The significance of non-appearance becomes blatantly obvious when the conditions within a particular culture are contrasted with those outside it. Byron’s absence from the Bulgarian Revival appears as a conspicuous lacuna when set against the backdrop of his omnipresence in the wider European context. Bulgarian Revival literature was preoccupied by didactic Enlightenment dispositions, and Romantic phenomena had little place in it. The quandaries of the modern individual were alien to the society’s patriarchal mentality. What translators had to consider was the cultural background and literary tastes of the reading public; in addition, it is worth mentioning the obvious fact that even when mediating between cultures, translators were generally the product of the same formative influences that shaped audience (Lekov 1988: 198). The readers of the period were naïve and opinionated; they preferred adventures to characters; they did not enjoy provocations and expected books to reinforce their moral principles. Nowadays popular culture relies on a very similar set of inclinations. The literature of the Revival did not emerge in a cultural vacuum, did it rise up like a phoenix reborn from the ashes (Nikolova 2004: 47); the perceptions of its readers were molded by the folklore they had been exposed to and the miscellanies (comprising homilies and secular stories) they read. In addition to aesthetic criteria, there was the corrective role of politics hanging over translators’ choices like the sword of Damocles. As one Byron scholar put it, the Byronic hero is “far too individualistic ever to be involved seriously with nationalism, and he is also too passionately concerned with individual freedom” (Thorslev 1965: 195). Byron’s poetry then could not rally the different strata of society for the sake of the ultimate goal, an independent Bulgarian state. Reception processes are influenced by various factors and the language of the source text is an issue worth discussing. The English language was not internationally 1. The National Revival period in Bulgaria is chronologically delayed in comparison with the European Renaissance. Most researchers would agree that the year 1762 marks its beginning and 1878 (when the Bulgarian state was restored) – its end.



Meaningful absences 

popular in the nineteenth century and the few Bulgarian readers of English-language texts were graduates of the American Robert College in Constantinople. This said, it is essential to bear in mind the specificity of translation practices in that period – the original was certainly not the only acceptable source for those who rendered texts in other languages; they would often use translations into other languages and even modifications of the original work. The adaptations of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac and of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which reached their readers via French and Greek and German, are pertinent examples of English-language texts popular among Bulgarians: in other words, English-language authors were not excluded from the Bulgarian Revival. Byron’s poems, of course, had become immediately available in French, as well as in German and in Russian, but they did not begin to appear in Bulgarian until the 1880s. In the context of Ottoman domination, when the priority was an independent Bulgarian state, the absence of Romantic poetry featuring the exceptional individual can hardly come as a surprise; the absence of Byron the freedom fighter, however, is perplexing. The English lord took an active part in organizing the Greek uprising of 1824 and he died in Missolonghi – facts that turned him into an icon for the Greeks and for freedom-loving Romantics throughout Europe. This revolutionary image of the Romantic poet was first introduced into the Bulgarian context as late as 1871. The delay may be linked to the dominant negative attitude of nineteenth-century Bulgarian patriots to all things Greek. In the political context of the Ottoman Empire, the Bulgarian church was subordinate to the Greek patriarchy up to 1872. Other sociopolitical circumstances also shaped the period of the Bulgarian Revival: “the fear of cultural and ethnic assimilation on the part of Orthodox Greeks, who were far ahead in their national processes, forced Bulgarians to mark themselves off ” (Daskalov 1998: 109). Whether Byron was perceived as a Trojan horse is hard to determine. What is certain is that there were two major tendencies among those who worked for Bulgarian independence, the enlighteners and the revolutionaries. The former believed in educating the masses first, while the latter insisted that freedom should come before education. This confrontation of ideas did not originate in Bulgaria; Boyan Penev, a historian of Bulgarian literature, traces the suggestion that without spiritual freedom there is no political freedom to the Greek author and intellectual Adamantois Korais (Penev 1978: 97). The debate on the most effective methods of fighting for Greek independence was current among the representatives of the London Greek Committee and personified by Colonel Stanhope and Lord Byron. At odds with the stereotype, the colonel published a newspaper in the Greek language and blamed the poet for trying to stifle the press, even though the publication was only possible with Byron’s financial aid (Gamba 1825: 102–3, 140). The best summary of Byron’s position is offered by William Parry:

 Vitana Kostadinova

Swords of various descriptions and manufacture, rifle-guns and pistols, carbines and daggers, were within reach on every side of the room. His books were placed over them on shelves, and were not quite so accessible. I afterwards thought, when I came to know more of the man and the country, that this arrangement was a type of his opinion concerning it. He was not one of those who thought the Greeks needed education before obtaining freedom: as I can now interpret the language, there was legibly written on the walls, – “Give Greece arms and independence, and then learning; I am here to serve her, but I will serve her first with my steel, and afterwards with my pen.” (Parry 1825: 16)

Such a revolutionary approach clearly contradicted the philosophy of the enlighteners, who were the ones to do translations and circulate periodicals. Popularizing Byron as a freedom fighter was tantamount to disobeying the sultan, especially in view of the fact that Mahmud II declared him an enemy of the Porte shortly before the poet’s death in 1824 (Gamba 1825: 256). While Bulgarian territories remained free of panslavistic dispositions, it was not inconsequential that among nineteenth-century Czech and Slovak nationalists Byron epitomized the degradation of the West, and Bulgarian intellectuals were not indifferent to Slavophile affinities (Penev 1978: 168). Josef Durdik’s appreciation of Byron was quite the exception in the Czech context (Prochazka 2000: 37–48). In any case, those affinities did not exactly facilitate the introduction of the Romantic poet to Bulgarian readers. To sum up the period, in the nineteenth century there was a conspicuous dissonance between Bulgarian cultural processes and European tendencies, which called for synchronization of literary thinking. Bulgarian translators tended to favor sentimental narratives and didactic texts. The aesthetic and poetic foundation needed for the reception of Byron’s poetry was lacking. Romantic individualism was out of place before 1878 and this accounted for the loss of the Byronic traits in poems by Pushkin and Lermontov translated into Bulgarian.2 In other words, both the literary and the social horizon of expectations were inadequate to the Byron phenomenon, and the period exemplified what Jauss would term a “rejection of the new aesthetic experience” (Jauss 1981: 141).

2. In the nineteenth century the Bulgarian poet and translator Petko Slavejkov published his adaptations of Pushkin’s “The orb of day has faded...” (“Погасло дневное светило...”) and “The Poet and the Crowd” (“Поэт и толпа”), as well as his versions of Lermontov’s “Prophet” (“Пророк”), “Prisoner” (“Узник”), “No, I am not Byron” (“Нет, я не Байрон, я другой...”), and “I go to the road alone” (“Выхожу один я на дорогу...”).



Meaningful absences 

Otherness and identity3 The Bulgarian state was restored in 1878 and synchronization with European cultural processes was in full swing at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, compensating for the belated reception of the leading figures of European literature (Byron among them). The Bulgarian modern age took a profound interest in Byron’s writings; nine translations of Manfred materialized within a couple of decades. Yet his Eastern Tales did not enjoy much attention: Lara appeared in Bulgarian in 1899 and a translation of The Bride of Abydos was published in 1906 (reprinted in 1919), followed by another translation in 1939. One explanation of this may relate to the specificity of the binary opposition of East vs. West. When, in The Bride of Abydos, the narrator introduces “the clime of the East” and “the land of the Sun,” he speaks as an outsider (Canto I, 1, line 16). The East, however, is not an absolute category it is “relational” and depends on one’s own situatedness, or “point of observation” (Todorova 1997: 58). The East as a notion takes many of the connotations of the Orient as a Western construct which “has helped define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (Said 1995: 1–2). Politically, as well as geographically, the Balkans function as a meeting point of East and West. Inevitably, this would be reflected in the self-identity of the people living on the peninsula. Still, the often judgmental usage of the concepts East and West has predetermined local sensitivity to such labels: With the exception of the Turks, in whose self-identity the East occupies a definite, although intensely discussed, place, all other Balkan nations have renounced what they perceive as East and think of themselves as, if incompletely Western, certainly not Eastern. They would allow to have been marked by the East, but this is a stain, not a sign in any fruitful way. Although competing in their pretense to be more “European” than the rest, and creating their internal hierarchies of less and more “orientalized” members, the only constituents who are brandished by an ultimate and absolute “orientalness” are the Turks. (Todorova 1997: 58)

In the literary circles of the early nineteenth century the Orient was all the rage and Madame de Stael advised Byron to “stick to the East” as “it was the only poetical policy” (Byron 1974: III, 101). This fashion, however, never really gained popularity among those deemed Oriental. I would also suggest that the regard for Byron’s Eastern Tales was and still is bound up with the balance between identification and alienation in the reading process (i.e., readers’ distance to the characters and situations) and with the dynamics of the correlation Self/Other. Theorizing otherness dates back to Byron’s own time when Hegel postulated that “each seeks the death of the other” (Hegel 1977: 113) and proposed what Popper would 3. The interpretation offered here is based on the imagined reception of Byron’s tales by a Christian majority of readers in Bulgaria. How the response of Muslim Bulgarians or other nonChristian minorities may differ needs to be researched.

 Vitana Kostadinova

refer to as the “thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis” model (Popper 1940: 404). Tzvetan Todorov’s binary of Self and Other draws upon Hegel’s initial distinction between the “individual” and the “other,” where the latter is “an unessential, negatively characterized object” (Hegel 1977: 113). Moreover, the opposition can be seen as organizing the very existence of individual subjects: “A phenomenon maintains its identity in semiotic systems only if other units are represented as foreign or ‘other’ through a hierarchical dualism in which the first is privileged or favored, and the other is deprivileged in some way” (Cahoone 2003: 11). Nonetheless, “the ‘other’ is also a self-consciousness,” an “individual” (Hegel 1977: 113), and thus Self and Other are inevitably associated. The idea of synthesis as a blending of opposites is essential for any discussion of Byron’s The Giaour. By featuring the Other, Byron’s Eastern Tales became a commercial success in Britain. They immediately gained popularity in Russia and influenced Pushkin’s writing,4 which means that access to them was not an issue for Bulgarian translators. Geographically, somewhere midway on the East-West axis, lay the Ottoman Empire, the narrative locus of most of the tales. And if for westerners, as well as for the Russian intelligentsia, the Balkans were emblematic of an exoticized Orient – even though for the latter the peninsula was to the west rather than to the east – for the residents of the Balkan countries, the site was home and the main character of a poem like The Giaour would be both easy and difficult to identify with. The problem is with the shifting point of view in the tale, which prevents readers from drawing a line between us and them in terms of ethnicity or religion and confuses their moral principles. At the crossroad of two systems of values, readers experience an identity problem because they run the risk of having their own identity “relativized” and “de-essentialized” (Dichev, 2002). I would argue that the historical circumstances in which the Ottomans had been the enemy for centuries, determined the inadequacy for Bulgarian readers of both the narrative technique of The Giaour and the ambivalent images presented there. The poem remained unfamiliar in Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Serbia, although in Poland, by contrast, it was included in the foreign-literature program for secondary schools.5 The rationale behind these preferences in the Balkans appears to be the inner necessity to keep psychological distance between the images of Self and the Ottoman Other. Back in 1850 The Bride of Abydos attracted the attention of Nikola Katranov, but no publication followed.6 Still, it is one of the two Eastern tales that was translated into Bulgarian. The poem mentions such Bulgarian topoi as “Widdin” (Canto II, 14, line 4. For a comprehensive discussion of the influence of Byron’s Eastern Tales on Pushkin’s Southern Tales, see Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunskij (1924): Жирмунский, В.М. Байрон и Пушкин: Из истории романтической поэмы, Ленинград: Академия, 1924. 5. The Greek reception of The Giaour seems to stand out with a translation of the poem into Greek in 1857. 6. According to bibliographical accounts, it is the first translation of a poem by Byron into Bulgarian, but the actual text was never located.



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710), “Sophia’s plain” (Canto II, 14, line 715), “Roumelie” (Canto II, 16, line 775), and the Danube (Canto I, 14, line 457; Canto II, 16, line 777), and this geographical outline is of interest for Bulgarian readers, whether employed in the cause of national identity formation, or appropriated by modernists on account of its Hamlet-like hero. The poem starts off as a story about a pacha (Giaffir) and his son and daughter (Selim and Zuleika), but it turns out that Giaffir has poisoned his brother and Selim is actually his nephew. The Bride of Abydos can be contrasted to The Giaour in that the two poems affect their readers differently and parallels between them highlight different Byronic projections of the Orient. The narrative voice of The Bride of Abydos represents the viewpoint of the Byronic hero and retains this perspective throughout, and so, the reader does not need to change allegiances and redirect sympathies. Unlike the Giaour, Selim is not an ambivalent hero; even though his name and religion are not Christian, he is constructed as a rebel and the allusions he makes are consistently Biblical: his monologues compare his uncle to Cain, and his beloved is named “The Dove of peace and promise to mine ark” (Canto II, 20, line 879), evoking reminiscences of Noah’s ark and the olive branch brought by the dove. (These are, of course, references to the Old Testament and one could consider the interpretation of the myths in the Qur’an, where the two sons of Adam are also mentioned (5.27–29) and Nuh is one of the five prophets of Islam.) Moreover, Selim’s initial protest seems provoked by the injustice of the pasha, who treats him ill, seemingly because he is the “son of a slave,” “From unbelieving mother bred,” “Greek in soul if not in creed” (Canto I, 4, lines 81, 82, 87). These circumstances allow the Bulgarian readers to keep their distance from the hero – on account of his religion as well as his Greek blood – while still supporting his protest against his father. In this tale about the Other, readers’ sympathies are directed by the portrayals of characters and a pre-conceived understanding of a just relationship between fathers and children. Or so it seems up to the point when it transpires that the pasha is actually the uncle guilty of fratricide. Notwithstanding all its intricacies, it is a story of human relations, easy to understand. With their roles in the family redefined, Selim and Zuleika’s affection for each other sheds its incestuous aura and the tale develops as a dramatic love story, in which the Eastern Ophelia has to choose between her father and her beloved. As in Shakespeare’s tragedy, only death wins when the inner conflicts of the soul become impossible to resolve. The title of the poem, featuring the bride, signals the work’s predominantly existential turn. The title of The Giaour, on the other hand, denotes a Muslim take on the hero: the word indicates an infidel, a person outside the Islamic faith – and the promise of a story related from the point of view of those who were the enemy is disturbing. (As it happens, the word entered into English from Turkish, with the mediation of its Venetian form ‘giaur’, and Byron’s hero is a Venetian.) The next challenge that readers encounter is the narrative technique of the poem, in which a number of fragments serve as the constitutive elements of a puzzle that needs to be put together. There are a number of speakers expressing different attitudes, a multiplicity of voices. After the

 Vitana Kostadinova

introductory celebration of Greece and Greek heroes from a British point of view, the narration is taken over by a Muslim voice, and when that voice refers to the hero with the emotionally charged “I know thee not, I loathe thy race” (line 191), Bulgarians are likely to conclude that the speaker is expressing militant Islamic attitudes. Possibly because of the centuries-long opposition of the religions of the conquered and the conquerors, as late as the end of the twentieth century Turkish in Bulgaria was an ethno-religious identification (Krasteva 1995: 125), and references to the Ottoman Empire cannot be free of religious connotations. In addition to this historically motivated socio-psychological disposition, the title of the poem itself announces that it is about an infidel, rather than about a Venetian, and the religious conflict is reproduced every time the hero is referred to as the Giaour. Such reminders that religious markers are central to identity in the Balkans are directly associated with the idea that the Ottomans ruled us, which touches a nerve with non-Muslim Balkan readers. National identities shaped in resistance to oppression naturally preserve the initial denial of them as a definitive feature of who we are. This identity constituent of the Self is inculcated through state institutions from a tender age; it persists through the years with the development of the individual and is resistant to change in the auto-images of the community. While western readers can estrange themselves from all parties in the poem and keep an emotional distance, Bulgarians are likely to sympathize with the Giaour in the story, “demonized” from the very beginning: “like a demon of the night/ He passed and vanished from my sight” (lines 202–203). Another intricacy that readers need to confront is the narrator’s claim to their sympathy: a “woman’s wildest funeral wail” (line 323) is offered as a comment on the murder of Hassan, the Giaour’s rival. The details of the scene reveal a mother’s anticipation of her son’s return, the emergence of the messenger, and the alternation of dread and hope in her interpretation of the signs detected in the messenger’s appearance. Readers cannot help sympathizing with Hassan’s mother, even though she is representative of the Other – thus lessening the tension between us and them by reinforcing the awareness that there is a level at which we are all the same. In this way, the voice of this fragment directs readers toward empathy with and compassion for the Ottoman characters. Later fragments of the tale are related by Christians who have given refuge to the Giaour, but those do not have the same effect as the one produced by the Muslim narrators, even though the hero remains the outsider. His own confessions before his death only confirm the ambivalence of the poem’s messages. The Giaour is among the most fluid of Byron’s heroes. The common noun used to denote him functions in lieu of the missing proper name and reinforces the generic implications of the tale. According to Byron’s advertisement for the poem, the protagonist is a young Venetian who avenges the death of his beloved thrown into the sea for infidelity. His nationality is not mentioned in the text of the poem. Deliberations on his identity begin with the Muslim voice that labels him “Apostate from his own vile faith” (line 616) and are carried over by the Christian narrator who calls him “some stray renegade / Repentant of the change he made” (lines 812–813). The Giaour refuses



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a cross above his head, thus leaving no trace to mark his grave and keeping the secret of his name. The hero’s anonymity allows for a number of different concretizations and serves as an example of Wolfgang Iser’s “gaps,” which abound in the poem, inviting the reader to fill in the missing textual information and contextualize the story according to his or her own background and experience. What is clear about the hero is that he acquires the characteristics of the Ottoman Other, i.e., he becomes orientalized. It is essential to bear in mind that the imagined Bulgarian reception of the poem is based on the story it is telling rather than on Byron’s attitude towards the Orient – the East inspires the Romantic poet, even though in Said’s opinion, “At most, the ‘real’ Orient provoked a writer to his vision; it very rarely guided it” (Said 1979: 22), and in The Giaour, “the Orient is a form of release, a place of original opportunity” (Said 1979: 167). Saree Makdisi elaborates that Byron’s Orient is a retreat and stronghold, offering protection against the advent of modernity (Makdisi 1998: 122–153). Placing the poet’s agenda aside, the Bulgarian responses to the tale are conditioned by the historical contact of the nation with the Ottoman Empire and the specific sensitivity of people who think of themselves as living on the border between the Orient and the Occident, or in Geshkov’s words: “the Balkan peninsula is a region of transition between Asia and Europe – between ‘East’ and ‘West’ – with their incompatible political, religious and social ideals” (cited from Todorova 1997: 59). For those readers who perceive otherness as hostile and define themselves in opposition, becoming the Other threatens their identity. Appropriating otherness can be perceived as treachery and indeed such is the case with American Indians that detest the Indian woman who translated for the conquistadors: The Mexicans, since their independence, have generally despised La Malinche as an incarnation of the betrayal of indigenous values, of servile submission to European culture and power. It is true that the conquest of Mexico would have been impossible without her (or someone else playing the same role), so that she is responsible for what occurred. I myself see her in quite a different light – as the first example, and thereby the symbol, of the cross-breeding of culture. (Todorov 1999: 101)

In many other respects, Bulgarian readers of Byron would have been ready to discover the Other in themselves and to realize that they “were not a homogeneous substance, radically alien to what is not them” (Todorov 1999: 3). Bulgarian translators certainly didn’t mind the Oriental-Occidental mix in Byron’s Don Juan. But the ambiguities with regard to the main character in Don Juan do not pose a threat to Bulgarian identity because the text invites aloofness and detachment in the reading process. This is the result of both the satirical nature of the poem and the quality of the hero as distant and exotic; thus Don Juan’s similarity and otherness are emotionally unengaging for Bulgarians. The Giaour, which is by contrast non-satirical and belongs to the popular genre of the Romantic narrative poem, provokes processes of identification with the protagonist

 Vitana Kostadinova

and, for readers in the Balkans, demands emotional investment. The hero is described as “pale” (line 194), with “sallow front” (line 194), associated with the “ghastly whiteness” of the tomb (line 239), and is later recognized by his “pallid brow” (line 611), whereas his adversary is called “black Hassan” (line 439). It is a shock to discover that the Giaour’s appearance resembles his enemy’s in the scene in which he kills Hassan: “And o’er him bends that foe with brow / As dark as this that bled below” (lines 673– 674). The protagonist has become a reflection of the antagonist and the symbolic parallelism of the two characters’ exterior has its correlative in their ethno-religious belonging and values – later in the poem the next raconteur would express uncertainty with regard to the identity of the Byronic hero: “Yet seems he not of Othman race,/But only Christian in his face” (lines 810–811). Soon after, the Giaour himself discloses that he shares the ideology of the Other:

Yet did he but what I had done Had she been false to more than one. Faithless to him, he gave the blow; But true to me, I laid him low: Howe’er deserved her doom might be, Her treachery was truth to me...       (lines 1062–1067)

Thus, the characteristics of the two are intermingled; as Meyer suggests, the Self “becomes the Other” in the course of the poem and identity is transformed (Meyer 1991: 678). And to the extent that “a change of identity presupposed a crisis of identity” (Greenfield 1992: 13), this concerned readers identifying with the hero as much as the hero himself. Disturbingly, the role of the recognizable Other in the tale falls to Leila – the interior Other in Tzvetan Todorov’s terminology: I can conceive of these others as an abstraction, as an instance of any individual’s psychic configuration, as the Other – other in relation to myself, to me; or else as a specific social group to which we do not belong. This group in turn can be interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the “normal”; or it can be exterior to society, i.e., another society which will be near or far away, depending on the case: beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own. (Todorov 1999: 3)

The Giaour, who cannot live without his lost love, implies he would have punished infidelity “in the Mussulman manner” (Byron 2000: 207). For Hassan, Leila was a faithless slave, and having rendered justice, “he goes to woo a bride, / More true than her who left his side” (lines 533–534). The narrator compares maids to butterflies and highlights beauty as paramount in both. Later the Byronic metaphor of the mind as a Scorpion is introduced – what is striking about it, in connection with the construction



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of the Woman as Other, is that the “Scorpion girt by fire” is a “she” (lines 423, 428). No comments link women to the dreaded creatures, but the fragment comes immediately after the analogy between insects and females, and the association established by the gender-specific pronoun remains: “‘She’ is Other. And ‘otherness’ itself becomes dreadful – particularly the otherness of the female, whose powers have always been mysterious to men, and evocative of the mystery of existence itself ” (Bordo 2003: 362). Readers are soon reminded that according to the Islamic creed “woman is but dust, A soulless toy for tyrant’s lust,” even though the poet counters this proposition of the text with a footnote, according to which “the Koran allots at least a third of Paradise to well-behaved women,” but he then adds that “by far the greater number of Mussulmans interpret the text their own way, and exclude their moieties from heaven” (Byron 2000: 244). The Giaour is probably Byron’s most interesting tale and can be discussed on a number of levels. It reinforces the Byronic hero type introduced by Childe Harold, and one of the distinctive features of Byronic heroes is their fluidity. Ambiguities and ambivalences can be recognized as essentially characteristic of the age of modernity and fitting for the Bulgarian modern period of the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth centuries, when society was rapidly adopting the ways of the new age and Byron was gathering popularity: because in the modern world of change “it is always better [...] to have a flexible identity rather than a permanent one” (Bradbury 1971: 5). This may be why Byronic traits appeared appealing in the contexts of modernism. But when the hero’s variability is interpreted as becoming the Other, i.e., the historically defined enemy, then it is all suddenly different. The Giaour becomes essentially the story of a racial conflict as a result of the narrative techniques used. It cannot be reduced to a love triangle and it stirs up emotions that resist analytical arguments. And so, this poem never made its way into Bulgarian or into most other Balkan languages.

Manfred – Superman and Bolshevik Another notable particularity in the Bulgarian appropriation of Byron concerns Byronism. Discussions of the phenomenon were current in the press in the 1920s but it was a century too late for Bulgarian intellectuals to be affected by his lifestyle. The specificity of modernism determined the narrow understanding of the Romantic as the poet of Weltschmerz, or ‘world weariness’ – the texts commemorating the centenary of his death hardly ever recalled Don Juan. His Bulgarian reception in this period was dominated by German cultural constructions, and the German fascination with Manfred marginalized the alternatives. In sharp contrast with the overwhelming presence of the dramatic poem in the Bulgarian context prior to World War II, socialist interpretations of Byron ignored it completely: there were no new translations, no reprints were allowed after 1946, and Manfred was hardly mentioned in textbook entries on Byron. Undoubtedly, the direct

 Vitana Kostadinova

link between the hero and Nietzsche’s Superman went against the grain of Socialist ideology. Even though the German philosopher pronounced God to be dead (Nietzsche 1974: 181), which would seem in agreement with Marx’s “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (Marx 1864: 43), his philosophy was nonetheless unacceptable. It was considered rather asocial in implying that values and truth do not exist and that ethics are a synonym for weakness. These Nietzschean tendencies can be easily traced back to the Byronic prototype of Superman: Manfred had been Nietzsche’s favorite work of literature from the age of thirteen (Hentschel 1981: 79), and this was not a recommendation for the Byronic hero. Nevertheless, the poem was included in the Russian edition of Byron’s works in 1981, which signals that there was something more to the Bulgarian suspicion of the text. The suppression of Manfred in Socialist Bulgaria owes a lot to Constantine Stefanov’s monograph Byron, the Poet of Freedom and World Grief (1930, in Bulgarian). The author, a professor at the University of Sofia, politicized Byron and declared Manfred a Bolshevik who undermined social order, science, religion, and culture, and had no respect for law, freedom of conscience, marital ties, or motherland (Stefanov 1930: 151, 153). He then went on to draw a parallel with Socialist Russia and claimed that the Soviet regime seemed to be relying on Manfred figures to rule the country (153). Obviously, the Byronic hero, as represented by the right-wing intellectual was no guarantor of the values a Socialist government would be trying to instill, and the interpretation of Bolshevism as individualism and destructive anarchism was absolutely unacceptable. Byron’s Manfred is constructed as an open text which can be co-authored by the readers, depending on their needs, knowledge and experience. The analogy between Byronism and Bolshevism indicates that, in this case, the “openness” of writing is not limited to “a range of rigidly pre-established and ordained interpretative solutions, [... which] never allow the reader to move outside the strict control of the author” (Eco 1989: 6). In the mirror of reception, “the literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period” (Jauss 1982: 21) – the ever changing images reveal how texts collaborate with contexts. Should the reflection be missing, however, it is not that the mirror is broken; each absence indicates a communication failure. Such failures could be the result of divergent or asynchronous cultural developments, which take the old question about translatability beyond linguistic considerations because, to paraphrase Sartre, one cannot translate “without a certain public which historical circumstances have made, without a certain myth of literature which depends to a very great extent upon the demand of this public” (Sartre 1965: 144). If demand functions as a self-regulatory mechanism of the culture market, at the other end of the spectrum governing ideologies sometimes interfere with translations: absence could be the result of auto-censorship or of the repressive control of the state. In the murky area between historical inadequacy and ideological vetoes, cultural sensitivity has claimed its own territory, which is historically grounded but should not be



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over-ideologized. Even though Christian readers in the Balkans may perceive the hero’s becoming the Ottoman Other as a threat to their own identity, this does not mean that the East is in the habit of snubbing its romanticized images.

Works cited Abrams, M. H. 1973. Natural Supernaturalism. NY and London: Norton. Bordo, Susan. 2003. “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought and the Seventeenth-Century Flight from the Feminine.” In From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, edited by L. Cahoone, 354–369. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bradbury, Malcolm. 1971. The Social Context of Modern English Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Byron, George. 1973–1980. Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand. Vol. 1–12. London: John Murray. –—. 2000. The Major Poetical Works, edited by Jerome McGann. Oxford: Oxford University Press. –—. The Bride of Abydos, edited by Peter Cochran. Available online: (accessed 30 May 2008). Cahoone, Lawrence. 2003. “Introduction”. In From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, edited by L. Cahoone, 1–13. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Daskalov, Rumen. 1998. Mezhdu Iztoka i Zapada. Bulgarski kulturni dilemi. Sofia: LIK. [in Bulgarian] Dichev, Ivailo. 2002. Ot prinadlezhnost kum identichnost. Politika na obraza. Sofia: Lik i Doiche vele. [in Bulgarian] Eco, Umberto. 1989. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gamba, Pietro. 1825. A Narrative of Lord Byron’s Last Journey to Greece. Extracted from the Journal of Count Peter Gamba, Who Attended His Lordship on That Expedition. London: John Murray. Greenfield, Liah. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press. Hentschel, Cedric. 1981. “Byron and Germany.” In Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Paul Graham Trueblood, 59–90. London: The Macmillan Press. Jauss, H.R. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. –—. 1981. “Theses on the Transition from the Aesthetics of Literary Works to a Theory of Aesthetic Experience.” In Interpretation of Narrative, edited by Mario Valdes and Owen Miller, 137–147. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Krasteva, Anna. 1995. “Etnichnost, natsionalna identichnost, grazhdanstvo.” In Identichnosti, edited by A. Krasteva, I. Katsarski, N. Bogomilova, P. Makalev, 111–164. Sofia: Mezhdunaroden tsentar po problemite na maltsinstvata i kulturnite vzaimodestviia. [in Bulgarian] Lekov, D. 1988. Pisatel-tvorba-vuzpriematel prez Bulgarskoto vuzrazhdane. Sofia: Nar. Prosveta. [in Bulgarian] Makdisi, Saree. 1998. Romantic Imperialism. Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 Vitana Kostadinova Marx, Karl. 1964. Early Writings. New York: McGraw Hill. McGann, Jerome. 1985. The Romantic Ideology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Meyer, Eric. 1991. “‘I Know Thee not, I Loathe Thy Race’: Romantic Orientalism in the Eye of the Other.” ELH 58.3: 657–699. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. Nikolova, Iuliia. 2004. Zapiski po bulgarska vuzrozhdenska literatura. Plovdiv: Khermes. Parry, William. 1825. The Last Days of Lord Byron with his Lordship’s Opinions on Various Subjects, Particularly on the State and Prospects of Greece. London: printed for Knight and Lacey. Penev, B. 1978. Istoriia na novata bulgarska literatura. Vol. 3. Sofia: Bulgarski pisatel. Popper, K. R. 1940. “What is Dialectic?” Mind 49 (196): 403–426. Prochazka, Martin. 2000. “Byron’s Reputation in Bohemia and Czech Nineteenth Century Nationalism.” The Byron Journal 28: 37–48. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1965. What Is Literature? Trans. Bernard Fretchman. New York: Harper and Row. Stefanov, K. 1930. Bairon – poet na svobodata i na mirovata skrub. Godishnik na SU, Istoriko-filologicheski fakultet. Vol. 26. Sofia: Khudozhnik. [in Bulgarian] Thorslev, Peter. 1965. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1999. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. University of Oklahoma Press. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press.

part iii

Pretexts

Translated by Goblin Global challenge and local response in Post-Soviet translations of Hollywood films Vlad Strukov

, Leeds, Great Britain In this chapter translation is employed as a metaphor for the process of reexamining and re-deploying previous cultural myths, paradigms, and discourses that has been at work in Russia since 1991 as part of the post-communist nation building project. The chapter provides an analytical account of film translations made by Goblin (aka Dmitrii Iur’evich Puchkov) in relation to digital technologies, the film industry and the associated artistic environment in post-Soviet Russia. The chapter focuses on the translator as a figure of cultural authority in a post-censorship state, which is in the process of re-negotiating economic and financial conditions, including intellectual property, in a more globalized world. The chapter traces the changes in the ideological and aesthetic role of translation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The analysis focuses on the global flows of cultural production and on the role of translators in the process of domestication of global products. The chapter advances the notion of translation as a creative means of cultural opposition and productive transformations.

Introduction As a new state, the Russian Federation arrived on the world scene in 1991, and ever since the country has been desperately trying to forge a sense of national unity and national identity by re-examining, re-deploying, and ‘translating’ previous cultural myths, paradigms, and discourses. The “transitional” period of the 1990s coincided with the advent of new digital technologies, especially the Internet, allowing for new forms of authorship and authority to emerge, even in the translation of foreign films into Russian. By providing an analytical account of Goblin’s film translations, the chapter explores several interrelated issues, namely, the role of digital technologies in transforming the film industry and the associated artistic environment, the status of the author

 Vlad Strukov

and the changing nature of social networks and national affiliations in a post-totalitarian society, and the function of the translator as a figure of cultural authority in a postcensorship state, which is in the process of re-negotiating economic and financial conditions – including intellectual property – in a more globalized world. Finally, the chapter examines the cultural status of translators in post-Soviet Russia by tracing the tradition of film translation practices from the 1970s to the present day, with emphasis on the changing political and cultural environment and perceptions of translators as figures of cultural authority. In this chapter, the term translation signifies a set of social and cultural practices that facilitate intercultural dialogue. These practices are analyzed in relation to the principles of distribution of foreign films on the Russian legal and pirate video market. Translation is further understood as a process of assimilation of foreign cultural content that does not necessarily result in the production of a ‘literary’ translation but rather in the production of audio-visual texts that deviate from the accepted norms of the Russian language, as well as from the established canons of translation, which signals a shift in the role of the translator as a cultural mediator. In fact, I argue that, thanks to his renditions of Hollywood films, Goblin emerges as a new type of author and authority. Problematizing translation as a cultural normative act, Goblin utilizes translation as a form of creativity, producing works of art that hover between the art of translation and the art of filmmaking.

Historical overview of film translation in Russia Translations (predominantly dubbings; subtitling was only rarely used as it maintained the ideological power of the original and granted access to the original text) of foreign films played an important role in maintaining and dismantling the authority of Soviet official culture and facilitating the transition to the contemporary market-based entertainment industry. In the 1970s, through a system of government ministries and departments, the Soviet state heavily censored foreign films. Translation was used as a method to ‘correct’ or ‘improve’ the ideological message of foreign productions. Films were frequently re-edited, with many scenes lost because of their controversial ideological message; dubbing was used to conceal phrases that were actually pronounced, disturbing the narrative cohesion of films and altering characterization and psychological causes of conflict. As a result, Soviet audiences had quite an incomplete and aberrant perception of foreign films, and generally, of world cinema as a phenomenon. In the 1980s, video recorders became a widely available and affordable commodity (the USSR began to produce its own make Elektronnika-VM12 in 1984), dramatically changing the ways films circulated among audiences. Although commercial distribution of videos was an illegal activity, the state no longer had the technological or logistical capability to control and censor content that was disseminated with the help of video recorders. Many foreign films that had not been released on the big screen almost



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instantaneously became available on video; the demand for foreign productions, both high quality films and semi-pornographic products – was extraordinary. Unfortunately, no data on the number of video recorders and foreign films that circulated on the market illegally is available. However, the dramatic drop in the number of officially produced feature films in that period (on average 150 films were released annually in the early 1980s and only 34 films in 1996) convincingly demonstrates the tremendous impact that video technology, in synch with other causes, had on the Soviet film industry, and it accounts for the changing patterns of consumption of audio-visual content in post-Soviet Russia. The increasing demand for foreign films provided translators with lucrative opportunities. The market of pirated videos was saturated with films that featured low quality translations, normally presented as a monotonous voice-over; there were also high-quality translations produced by Soviet professional translators and interpreters. Their identity became known to Russian audiences only in the early 1990s after censorship was outlawed, and they were invariably imagined as legendary figures. Their disembodied voices were known to virtually all film viewers in the Soviet Union and their work manifested a move towards a different social practice: at that time watching a video was an act performed predominantly in the privacy of people’s home as opposed to viewing films in gigantic Soviet cinemas, making private viewership into an act of resistance aimed at Soviet official public culture. Such film translators as Aleksei Mikhailovich Mikhalev (1944–1994), Vasilii Ovidievich Gorchakov (b. 1951), and Leonid Veniaminovich Volodarskii (b. 1950), to name just a few, became aural symbols of the liberating period of perestroika. Aleksei Mikhalev’s career exemplifies the Soviet modus operandi; he was educated at Moscow State University and worked as an interpreter from English and Farsi in the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, securing his position as Leonid Brezhnev’s personal interpreter in the 1970s. In addition to his professional career in the political realm, he made a name by translating literary texts, including James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. In the 1970s, he worked as an interpreter at Soviet film festivals, and in the 1980s, he began making translations of films to be distributed on video, including translations of such films as Miloš Forman’s 1975 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Ingmar Bergman’s 1980 From the Life of the Marionettes. In this way, his career demonstrates how an interpreter professionally trained in Soviet educational and cultural institutions could engage with new technology to carry out work that was incongruous with official discourse. The 1990s were characterized not only by the collapse of the film industry and of the Soviet economy in general but also by the disintegration of the institutions of cultural authority, i.e., various ministries, professional unions and associations, clubs and festivals, and so forth. The new market-oriented cultural environment provided individuals with means of expression and dissemination unthinkable under the Soviet regime. Translators and interpreters emerged as successful entrepreneurs and helped shape the new economic and cultural climate, including through their engagement with new digital technologies. Goblin, a Russian translator mostly of Hollywood productions, started

 Vlad Strukov

demonstrating his work on the Internet and eventually managed to turn his professional identity into a recognizable brand, slicing off a share of the film market and moving on to Russian television. A significant measure of the popularity of Goblin’s work is the constant circulation of his jokes and adages in everyday discourse and the celebration of his witticisms on the Internet and in other forms of mass media. For example, Viktor Kotov, a Goblin aficionado, maintains a website listing all of Goblin’s statements arranged by theme, propagating Goblin as an unofficial cultural authority figure (Kotov). Goblin is the cognomen of Dmitrii Iur’evich Puchkov (born in 1961 in Kirovograd, Ukraine), who – prior to his career as a translator of foreign films – worked as a police detective, a fact that accounts for his full appellation of [Starshii upolnomochennyi Goblin] whereby the first two words designate his rank in the Russian militia – ‘principal investigating officer.’ The address of his personal website http://oper.ru/ makes a similar reference to his early occupation since the colloquial noun [oper] denotes a special police investigator, or – under the Soviet regime – a political case police officer. Paradoxically, his current vocation rebukes the ethos of his previous profession insofar as he is notorious as a pirate of electronic and audio-visual media. Goblin began in 1995 by translating Brian De Palmo’s 1993 film, Carlito’s Way, soon followed by versions of James Cameron’s Aliens of 1986 and John McTiernan’s 1993 release, Last Action Hero, which he showed to a group of friends but did not release publicly (Goblin 2003). VCR technology eventually enabled his translations to circulate widely and gained their author enormous popularity. It was with the emergence of the DVD format, however, that Goblin’s translations reached mass audiences, as his fans were able to copy and distribute extracts or full versions of his works via informal networks or on the Internet. In addition, digital encoding facilitated Puchkov’s artistic process as he was finally able to work with video and sound files directly, while pirates were able to produce digital copies at low cost. Though of poor technical quality, files with Goblin’s translations downloaded from his website gave a powerful aesthetic impression and encouraged users to purchase full versions of his film translations in Russia’s open-air markets, which sold pirated videos. At this stage Puchkov completely lost control over the distribution of his work, as it was now in the hands of unofficial commercial enterprises and the pirate infrastructure. In 2003, it was estimated that Russia’s pirate market was worth 311 million dollars (Walsh). Puchkov has adamantly rejected any claims that he receives revenues from the sale of pirated DVDs that use his translations of Western films.

Goblin’s (im)proper translations Goblin’s output falls into two distinct categories: translations proper and the re-scripting of original productions in the target language. He formally distinguishes between these two groups of works by ascribing his own authorship to the specially designed creative studios Polnyi Pe and Bozh’ia Iskra. The title of the former is a common



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euphemism for the Russian obscenity pizdets: the word is a derivative of pizda, literally means ‘cunt,’ and is used as a descriptive term or as an exclamation referring to various emotional states, including admiration and shock. The latter name – meaning ‘divine spark’ – is a Russian idiomatic expression used to describe a person’s talent as an extension of God’s immanent powers. The studios’ names reveal the nature of his creations; the first group includes translations of foreign films into Russian, generously spiced up with both common and newly-coined profanities – 28 Days Later; Alien, Alien: Resurrection; The Big Lebowski; Blade; Evil Dead and many others. The second group consists of creative renditions of major international and Hollywood productions that include producing new scripts for and renaming well-known films – Star Wars renamed Star Wars: Storm in a Glass; The Matrix renamed Schmatrix, which is a reference to a low register word [shmatok] meaning ‘a piece’; and The Lord of the Rings trilogy – as well as an intra-lingual ‘translation’ of Petr Buslov’s 2003 gangster movie Bimmer, re-named Anti-Bimmer. In his translations proper, Puchkov attempts to achieve “a better quality of translation” (Goblin 2003). As he explains on his website, in the 1990s he felt the need to produce new translations in order to compensate for the distorted impressions left by poor dubbings of foreign films that had flooded the Soviet market in the late 1980s and early 1990s: “The sheer quantity of phrases left un-translated and obvious flubs always annoyed me. Even then I wanted to make proper translations, that is to say, of the quality deserved by a good film.”1 His observation is remarkable in that he notes not only the poor quality of translations but also a certain lack of cinematic experience on the part of Russian audiences. According to him, Russian viewers seemed unable to make impartial aesthetic judgments, resulting in the privileging of Western – in most cases low quality Hollywood – productions over domestic products. “After Soviet drabness, everything that arrived from the West appeared particularly interesting and fresh.”2 In his commentary Puchkov articulates a cultural practice specific to post-totalitarian societies whereby, following the lifting of ideological – and inevitably aesthetic – censorship imposed by the state, consumers invariably turned to productions released in the West, assuming that those productions – unlike films produced in the USSR – were free from any ideology. In Russia, this practice was an extension of the chernukha film period, which was characterized by graphic naturalism and unrelenting negativity aimed at the de-Sovietization of culture. While chernukha introduced themes previously forbidden on the Soviet screen, for example, drug addiction, homeless people, and so forth, 1. “Количество непереведённых фраз и очевидные ляпы раздражали с самого начала. Уже тогда хотелось сделать перевод как следует, то есть так, как того заслуживает хороший фильм.” [The sheer quantity of phrases left untranslated and obvious flubs always annoyed me. Even then I wanted to make proper translations, that is to say, of a quality a good film deserves.] 2. “После советской серости всё, что шло с Запада, казалось исключительно интересным и свежим.” [After Soviet drabness, everything that arrived from the West appeared particularly interesting and fresh.]

 Vlad Strukov

Puchkov achieved the deconstructive function of chernukha by excavating the ‘forgotten’ areas of the Russian language. In his translations Goblin enthusiastically engaged with the register that had been previously taboo in Soviet official culture by providing literal translations of English profanities. While striving to achieve a linguistic equilibrium in his translations proper, Goblin destabilizes social norms of verbal conduct by putting forward discourses that are totally ‘improper.’ Though often ignoring the fact that vulgar expressions carry different connotations in Russian and English-speaking cultures, Goblin always demonstrates his heightened awareness of desecrate discourse. He has created a theory of translation of profanities that pays tribute to their semantic and performative function. On his website he lists obscenities and accounts for their usage: “Command – Go fuck yourself. Incompetence – He’s a fuck-up. Laziness – He’s a fuck off. Ignorance – He’s a fucking jerk. Trouble – I guess I’m fucked now. Confusion – What the fuck. Despair – Fucked again. Philosophical – Who gives a fuck? Denial – You ain’t fucking me. Rebellion – Fuck the world. Annoyance – Don’t fuck with me.” The natural differences between the grammatical structures of the two languages, the vocabulary patterns and – most importantly – their socio-cultural applicability prompted Puchkov to invent utterances and expressions that served his artistic needs. His most successful translations and new coinages truthfully render the emotional aspect of the original dialogue; linguistically speaking, however, they are problematic as he follows the syntactical structures of the original text, and his verb usage is greatly influenced by English. For example, he translates the command ‘Identify yourself ’ as bud’te dobry identifitsiruites’ whereby he opts for the obvious calque rather than the more standard descriptive forms of identifitziruite sebia or predstav’tes’. Puchkov’s translations create a special effect of estrangement, or ostraneniie, since they keep the viewer cognizant of the fact that s/he is experiencing a cinematic work produced in a different culture. They also appear in a specific context – the genre of science fiction, fantasy or gangster film – whereby language is manipulated to achieve certain effects of alienation, thus emulating the distant future, the unreal events of dreamscape or the cultural substrata of the criminal underworld.

Goblin’s discordant creations On the one hand, Goblin strives for translation purity and authenticity;3 on the other, he has polluted the cultural environment with the powerful toxins of Russian 3. “В моем переводе негодяи, а также полицейские и военные говорят нормальным русским языком. Таким, на каком говорит вся страна. А не на таком, на котором говорят выпускники филфака, в жизни ни одного негодяя не видевшие. [In my translations, the film baddies, as well as the police and the army speak proper Russian. They speak that Russian which is in use in the whole country. They do not speak the Russian that is in use between University language departments graduates who have never met a baddie in their whole life.] Available online: http://www.rdig.ru/articles/?article_id=457. (Accessed 18 July 2008).



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profanities. At first they shocked Russian audiences, but later, when the novelty wore off, they began to amuse them. Always conscious of the desires of his audiences, Goblin immediately armed himself with a new creative tool: by consciously altering the meaning to exaggerate vulgar expressions, he now strove to use translation as a form of popular entertainment. From the consumer’s point of view, a DVD with a Western film in Goblin’s translation carried added value and was worth more money than a copy with a standard translation. Puchkov began to manipulate the viewers’ expectations and infer meaning and excitement by distorting the original production, resulting in the creation of a postmodern pastiche/parody. For example, viewers would start watching Goblin’s translation of The Lord of the Rings, expecting his usual rendition, rich in emotional insights and vulgarities, but would soon be carried away by a different sort of narrative. Puchkov sets Tolkien’s tale in contemporary Russia and re-christens the characters with comical Russified names. For example, Frodo Baggins becomes Fedor Mikhailovich Sumkin, formed from the Russian word sumka meaning ‘bag,’ while the first name and patronymic refer to Dostoevsky; Gollum is renamed Golyi because the original name sounds similar to the Russian word golyi, meaning ‘naked’; Baramir and Faramir are called Baralgin and Efferalgan, which are common names for paracetomol; Legolas is renamed Logovaz after a Russian car company famed for its model the Lada; not only was Gimli changed to Givi but his ethnicity, too, was changed – he is now a Georgian who speaks with a distinctive southern accent; and so on. In this way, the characters adopt new identities and the story line achieves a new direction. Puchkov maintains the progressive logic of development, however, by replacing the totalizing narrative of the original with non-aligned themes and his own versions. First of all, Goblin’s translations shift out of the historical context, i.e., the historicism of the Hollywood project is denounced in favor of synchronicity. Furthermore, he presents himself as an unreliable narrator who frequently deviates from his original narrative intention or abandons it altogether, and is willing to modify his own identity in the course of his story-telling. Puchkov’s distinctive voice – both as the author and narrator – is a powerful tool that helps him to define an extraordinary language which he created by compiling phrases and intonations from the English language and Russian criminal argot. The differences between them are in the globality of the first and the localness or marginality of the latter, of the alleged all-inclusiveness of English as opposed to a register associated with a narrow social group. English is embedded in the visual paradigm – though the Russian viewers often cannot hear the English, they can always see it, insofar as English words are articulated by the actors on the screen – while Russian is restricted in use to its traditional oral mode. While English strives for originality, Goblin’s creative renditions exploit words and phrases that had already entered the folklore and the nation’s unconscious, for example, citations from Aleksandr Pushkin’s poems. The humor is derived from the contrast between the visual information and the phrases or music that accompany them. For example, in the scene where the hobbits are chased by the Dark Horse Rider and hide in the roots of a tree, Goblin inserts

 Vlad Strukov

an extract from a song by Zemfira, Russia’s leading female rock singer. The electrifying melody of the song and passionate lyrics that allude to searching for a lost soul mate, contradict the story and the visual setting in which the hobbits are under death threat. Since the Russian viewer is very familiar with both the film and the song, the novelty effect stems from the juxtaposition of the two; in fact, Goblin’s parody is double-edged because it attacks both the original film and the Russian pop song. Therefore, the work of Goblin is an audible creation as it involves verbal and musical constructions aimed at delineating and distorting the visual paradigm. Dialogues cease functioning because they no longer relate to the actual story, character or activity, and instead form their own narratives. Goblin problematizes the status of his own ‘translations’ as he presents them as autonomous productions – they can be downloaded as separate mp3 files from his website. As a result the sound of the original Hollywood movie becomes secondary as the movie is now meant to accompany the ‘translation,’ and not the other way round, as one would expect. By offering the home viewer the opportunity to play the sound files simultaneously with the showing of the film, Goblin delegates command over the sound production to the viewers. By placing the source of the sound in the very environment of the viewer, Goblin overcomes the dichotomy between diegetic and nondiegetic uses of sound (and/or music) in film. Such use combats the primacy and pre-existence of the narrative and the relationship of the visual and audible sources and refers not to merely seeing or listening but to actively knowing about the film. Moreover, Goblin’s sound and music scoring does not move concurrently with the action, but this does not mean that it simply contradicts the visual events on the screen; instead it organizes them in a new way. Unlike in traditional cinema, sound/music in Goblin’s films does not connect characters or events across vast divides of narrative time and space; on the contrary, it builds bonds between the present and past experiences of the viewer; it also refers to audible events and signifies the passage of time outside the film. Goblin’s use of sound deconstructs the principle of inaudibility pertinent to film narratives because it is perceived in a conscious manner and does not subordinate itself to dialogue and visuals, the primary vehicles of the narrative. The viewer normally expects the soundtrack to emphasize certain emotions suggested in the narrative. In Goblin’s case, however, the sound is not a signifier of emotion but rather a structural element. Finally the sound does not create a coherent whole by providing formal and rhythmic continuity between the shots and in transition between scenes; on the contrary Puchkov uses it to punctuate changes in perspectives and breaks in the narrative. In contemporary Western society consumption of sound in general and music in particular is broadly figured as a leisure activity. Goblin’s films help transfer the music and sound across the cultural boundaries and they become a participatory process since the audiences are engaged in identification and interpretation of the implications of the messages rather than merely in following the acoustic narrative. For example, when Frodo (Fiodor Sumkin) speaks to a barman in a local pub, he introduces himself as James Bond; the scene is accompanied by music from



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Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 Pulp Fiction. By altering the soundtrack, Goblin achieves a humorous effect; furthermore, he undermines the conventions of the original film by shifting the emphasis from the search story towards a crime drama and a spy narrative, the genre affiliations that Goblin adhered to from the very beginning of his creation by calling it The Posse and the Rings. In other words, Goblin perceives translation as a tool to convey some meaning from the original production as well as an effective narrative mechanism and an aesthetic contrivance that enables him to work across different genres, media, and cultural spheres; in this way translation functions as a means for the construction of new meaning in a new cultural setting that nonetheless derives from the original socio-linguistic context.

When ‘anti’ becomes ‘pro’ As Goblin’s later work demonstrates, the pretext for his ‘translations’ does not necessarily have to be foreign; he is able just as well to infer meaning from the subtext of Russian culture, creating a parody of the original film production and of the cultural context in which it emerged. His use of translation for creative means is particularly striking in his rendition of Russian made films. Goblin’s humorous adaptation of Petr Buslov’s 2003 Bimmer, a dark gangster movie that has enjoyed extraordinary popularity in Russia, entailed re-scripting the storyline, re-imagining the identities of the characters, and re-mastering the visual paradigm, resulting in the creation of a new, lighter genre – a comedy/adventure road movie. In the original film, a group of four gangsters are forced to run away and hide, whereas in Goblin’s 2003 Anti-Bimmer four seemingly harmless friends are on their way to the European football championship in Lisbon, Portugal. The most noticeable changes involve the cutting of the beginning of the original film, in which the gangsters steal the car, and the film’s finale, in which most of the characters die. Goblin’s confidence in the comprehensibility of the new content lies in the assumption that the viewers are familiar with the original production and therefore will be able to appreciate the modifications. Goblin disavows his intention in the very first scene of Anti-Bimmer as he changes the exposition by suggesting that one of the gangsters is actually the owner of the car: rather than stressing misappropriation and miscomprehension (the hero steals the car) – as the original film does – Puchkov values the assumed validity and authenticity (now the hero possesses the car). In addition, he charges the film with optimism, a rare emotional feature in Russian cinema, as the four friends do not die: having realized they missed the match in Portugal, they make a new plan to go to Greece for the Olympic Games. Furthermore, Puchkov cuts out the most violent scenes in the film and refrains from the use of profanities typical in his translations proper, making his production suitable for consumption by a mass audience. Indeed, Anti-Bimmer was aired on the Russian TNT television channel on January 31, 2005, in prime time – 10 p.m. – and was re-broadcast the following morning as a segment of the channel’s program of comedy shows. This fact demonstrates

 Vlad Strukov

that, in spite of Goblin significantly altering the content of the original film, his work is still perceived as translation (‘perevod’) in both the popular imagination and in professional spheres, where ‘perevod’ stands for the creation of a new system of meanings that uses and abuses the previously known cultural context, and the construction of this new meaning occurs in the sphere of language, be it the Russian language, or the language of film production. As part of his complex encoding strategy, Puchkov modifies the speech of his characters, forcing them to speak with regional accents on the subject of classical Russian literature, geography, physics and the like, a move that was aimed at reaching out to younger – possibly, high school student – audiences. Puchkov mixes modes, registers, and discourses, for instance, the Soviet bureaucratic style, teenager ‘speak’, criminal argot, and the patois of Hollywood science fiction and fantasy movies. Paradoxically, this mixture of tones, fashions and sounds most truthfully reflects the linguistic morass of the post-Soviet space as the Russian language struggles to free itself from the burdens of Soviet ideological formulas to accommodate new emancipatory tendencies while simultaneously resisting the overwhelming influence of global English. Therefore, in his ‘creations,’ Puchkov not only relies on language as a performative act but also performs language itself, whereby his role as ‘translator’ – as he perceives it – involves the permanent reevaluation of cultural traffic and its transposition into cinema, with language itself as the main perceptual category and artistic currency. In Puchkov’s creative work language is a medium that transports meaning and value across national borders but also shows its ability to transcend and corrupt connotations in specific contexts. The artist perceives language as a malleable medium that enhances the plasticity of cinema in relation to its temporal categories and signifiers. Eventually Goblin divorces the Russian language from the language of cinema by producing (renditions of) literary texts published in the form of books. In 2007, The St. Petersburg-based publisher Ast, Astrel’ released three texts authored by Goblin. They are literary adaptations of Puchkov’s earlier interpretations of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy: Bratva i kol’tso, or ‘The Posse and the Ring, Vozvraschenie bomzha – ‘The Return of the Homeless/Wanderer’, and Dve sorvannye bashni – ‘Two Blown Towers.’ By working in different media and genres, including video/computer games, Puchkov has established a different understanding of translation as a creative process resulting in the construction and perpetuation of the identity of the author and his authority as a connoisseur of popular culture. Eventually, Puchkov successfully managed to develop ‘Goblin’ into a flourishing brand whereby other creative industries rely on Goblin’s identity to produce cultural works. For example, in December 2006, Gaijin International, one of Russia’s largest developers of online and computer videogames, released a game entitled Bratva i kol’tso based on Goblin’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (anonymous review). The game simultaneously follows the script of the original cinematic production and relies extensively on the alternative film scenario created by Puchkov. The game narrative focuses on the need to reach Mordovia and dispose of the burdensome ring; the player may adopt one of the seven identities created in



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accordance with Goblin’s interpretation – Fedor Sumkin, Baralgin, etc. The adventure genre of the game presupposes that in order to win the player must overcome various hurdles that appear along the way. These challenges stem from the conflicts in the original Lord of the Rings but also follow the path paved by Goblin. For example, the game characters are prone to the stereotypical Russian malaise of heavy drinking. In their looks, the characters are similar to the film heroes; their appearance, however, also displays some novelty tokens, such as the Swastika or Soviet symbols, which are more relevant to the socio-political discourse of Goblin’s creations since he uses the film parody to dismantle the old Soviet power relations, redundant in a post-totalitarian society.

Goblin as a figure of authority Puchkov’s work, Goblin’s identity and its multiple reincarnations in various media pose a number of significant theoretical questions about the authenticity of his translations and the authenticity of digitally reproduced materials, all related to the role of the author in a post-censorship state. In the Soviet Union the author – normally a writer of literary texts – attained a high level of prestige, and authors working in the domains of unofficial culture enjoyed very high levels of popularity and authority. For example, in the 1970s, the unofficially reproduced tape recordings of performances by Vladimir Vysotskii, a Soviet bard, or singer-songwriter, helped to circulate not only anti-government sentiments but also helped to maintain Vysotskii’s cultural authority. In Puchkov’s case, following the collapse of the USSR, this role was taken over by a translator whose aim was not so much to produce meaning but rather to interpret it, and whose work was in high demand in a society that had undergone a major social, political, and cultural transformation and was desperate for interpretative models rather than new systems of signification. Puchkov asserts the transforming imperatives of the new symbolic order by questioning the status of language and identity in the post-Soviet environment. In his linguistic corpus he reacts to and against two flows of cultural change, one associated with the need to reinvent the Russian language and the other with the increasing influence of English used as the language of a new – digital – modernity imported into Russian in the early 1990s. Ultimately, Puchkov questions the status of language in general in a globalized world. He and his commentator discuss cross-cultural adaptation and the authenticity of linguistic forms employed in Hollywood productions and their domesticated versions. As Walsh writes in his review of Puchkov’s work in The Observer, “The trick of his silver screen success is that the Goblin redubs Hollywood movies, using his own ‘better’ Russian alternative to the script” (Walsh). A desire for ‘better’ quality operates in the realm of progress and modernization and contrives to separate the underdeveloped past from technological modernity. However, Puchkov undermines this desire by utilizing parody and enabling pirates to circulate illegal copies of DVDs, resulting

 Vlad Strukov

in a collective rather that private ownership of cultural capital. Such a divide originated in the Soviet Union when an underground culture proliferated as an effective means of opposition to what was an ideologically-charged and aesthetically-challenged mainstream culture. This unofficial culture thrived in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to new forms of reproduction of information, especially the tape-recorder and video-recorder, and the authenticity of the recorded material, that is, its source, mattered less than its actual message. With the collapse of the Soviet empire and abolition of censorship it seemed that that cultural divide would disappear forever. Contrary to expectations, however, the divide persisted in the form of pirating. Pirating as an illegal distribution of copied authentic materials was the population’s natural reaction to Russia’s economic demise of the 1990s and the horrors of the financial crisis of 1998. However, in addition to purely economic considerations, pirating carried a notion of liberalization because it privileged independent production and consumption of electronic materials, a privilege unthinkable in the USSR. Finally, pirating replaced a system of blat – informal networks – that existed in the Soviet Union and made its economy actually work. Puchkov’s work demonstrates the instability of Russia’s cultural identity in relation to its Soviet past and also the volatile nature of Russia’s democracy after 2000. While in the period of 1995–2005 Goblin enjoyed phenomenal success on the pirated home video market, since 2006 he has become a mainstream figure as his work has been recognized by major film and TV producing companies. For example, in 2006 ORT screened The Sopranos TV series in Puchkov’s translation (ORT). Nevertheless, in spite of this official recognition and copyright enforcement in Russia, DVDs with Goblin’s translations continue to circulate in pirated version on the Russian market, resisting the power of the state. This practice seems to be an extension of the practice of distributing video content pertinent to the 1980s. Recording and reproduction have always been a means of social control – especially in the Soviet Union – and economic domination and power belonged to the authority that was able to reproduce the divine world, not to the one who gives it a voice. Goblin’s translations seize this power back; indeed, he claims the powers of the oracle as – in Bakhtinian terms – he shifts from the repetitive penances of Lent to the differentiated masks of Carnival, from monologue to polyglossia, from representation to repetition, from the divine to the profane. Power is incorporated in the very process of selection of repeatable molds rather than in the control of the capital of force. Goblin’s translations show that reproduction is the death of the original and the triumph of the copy: the mold has no value in itself, it is just one of the factors in production. In this sense, the copy undervalues the authenticity of the original, or as Benjamin puts it, “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced” (Benjamin 1968: 221).



Translated by Goblin 

While questioning authenticity and authority figures, Goblin uses his creations to determine – of course, ironically – social cohesion and cultural tradition. Both the original The Lord of the Rings and its Goblin’s renditions invoke imagined communities. The film brings to life Tolkien’s dreamland populated by various peoples, such as hobbits, elves, dwarves and humans; Puchkov’s pseudonym ‘Goblin’ evokes Tolkien’s pre-cinematic archetypes. In Goblin’s interpretation, however, the imaginary cinematic world undergoes a process of domestication as hobbits become gangsters (bratva), orki become urki, meaning ‘criminals,’ and so forth. Goblin’s work after 2000 reflects on the ironic return of Soviet cultural discourse as the next stage in national identity formation in post-Soviet Russia, focusing in particular on decoupling the concept of ‘Russian’ from that of ‘Soviet’ as an intellectually and politically inspired project. The choice of films for travesty is significant; most of the films translated by Goblin deal with the superhero. In Goblin’s project this superhero is a criminal who fills the void left after the fragmentation of post-Soviet governmental institutions and their incapacity to deal with the modern situation, conflicting political jurisdictions within the inherited polity, disorganization of the economy, and widespread disorientation. The rings and the associated crime – the rings have been stolen – become symbols of misconfigurations between the state and the nation (the latter reveals itself in the matrix of The Lord of the Rings, in which the struggle for the ring is a struggle for ultimate power in the kingdom versus a struggle for the national aspirations of the hobbits) while the superhero achieves his position thanks to his extraordinary personal traits. The issue of belonging and of authenticity is then resolved as loyalty to the superhero and his gang. Goblin’s rendition feeds on the image of gangsters that becomes a form of collective identity with its networks and attributes, rituals and behavior. In this context, the occupation of a literal territory is no longer necessary: the hobbits that leave their village turn into nomads who own a ring that is synonymous with capital. In other words, with the emergence of the national structure of bratva, owning and controlling money becomes more important than controlling space. Therefore, Goblin’s project is an example of bitter social satire that has two targets, global capitalism and local Russian society with its concerns over power and money and the tensions between the country’s past and present. The opening scene of the film sets the agenda as the voice-over comments on the patriarchal landscape of the village of hobbits where the main character returns after a few years of wandering, “The world has not changed much: people steal as before; MacDonald’s have cropped up everywhere, it is funny I don’t see them here.”4 Thus, Goblin’s project is a refraction of cultural concerns that responds to the Hollywood cinematic paradigm through the lens of the text by exaggerating or refocusing the films textually. It is a local response to global economy and culture. The 4. “в мире все как обычно: воруют все потихонечку, понастроили везде Макдональдсов, что-то у вас их здесь не видно?” [The world is just the same: people steal little by little, everywhere now there are MacDonald’s, how come you do not have one here?]

 Vlad Strukov

private self of emotion and intellect is displaced by an exteriorized identity that is more concerned with verbal spectacle and audible display than with psychological, moral or emotional responses to the global society. The graphic ornamentation and verbal representation of the Goblin project displays the hypermediacy of the Internet by which it attains the real by filling the screen with various kinds of information. The spatial hypermediacy of the Internet corresponds with the time intermediacy of television: both reveal the necessity to provide an on-going, unstoppable flow of information. The cinematic duration derived is replaced by aural and visual iconography that celebrates the simultaneity of multi-level narratives. Goblin utilizes de-lineated narration for satirical effect; on another level, the aural mosaic of his films provides a truthful representation of contemporary Russian, with new cultural voices achieving authenticity and authority with the voice of an amateur translator playing a significant role in the dissemination of cultural products. The success of Puchkov’s work also relies on the new DVD technology. In fact by offering viewers an option to see films with his translation, he broadens the possibilities provided by the medium. Normally, DVDs allow viewers to enjoy a number of extra features, such as previews of new releases, photo archives, director and cast biographies, script notes, and so forth. One of the main features that this technology has put forward is the opportunity to see film scenes that have been cut out, that is to enjoy productions in another form, or what is known as ‘the director’s cut.’ While ‘the director’s cut’ often represents a struggle between the work of the film director and the interests of the studio, and ultimately between the creative force and the force of global capitalism, Puchkov’s work – or ‘the translator’s cut’ – represents the tensions between globalization of cultural production and localization of its consumption. Thus, Goblin emerges as a new figure of authority facilitating the process of domestication of global products by using translation as a creative means of opposition and productive transformations.

Works cited Anonymous review of the computer game Bratva i kol’tso. Available online: http://gamenavigator.ru/games/7348/ (Accessed 18 July 2008). Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 219–253. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Kotov, Viktor. Gost – Goblin tak skazal. Available online: (Accessed 18 July 2008). Goblin. 2003.Voprosy Goblinu pro Perevody Fil’mov. 14 June, 2003. Available online: http://oper. ru/torture/read.php?t=1045689061 (Accessed 23 July 2008). ORT news program. 2006 (2 November). Available online: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bHsoUecC-w0 (Accessed 18 July 2008). Walsh, Nick Paton. 2003. “Russia’s Cult Video Pirate Rescripts ‘Lord of the Rings’ as Gangster Film.” The Observer (Sunday 22 June). Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2003/jun/22/film.lordoftheringsfilms (Accessed 18 July 2008).

“No text is an island” Translating Hamlet in twenty-first-century Russia Aleksei Semenenko

Stockholm University, Sweden This chapter discusses recent Hamlet translations in Russia in the context of the history of translation theory and canonicity. The introduction provides a short description of the history of Hamlet translations in Russia, while the main part focuses on the analysis of the translations that have appeared in the period from 1999 to 2008. As the article demonstrates, the Russian Hamlets of the twentyfirst century are closely linked to previous canons of Hamlet and depend not really on the source text but on the complex intertextual (and intersemiotic) relations primarily among translations within the target culture.

Introduction In Russian culture Shakespeare’s play Hamlet occupies, to say the least, a significant position. It has been translated more times into Russian than into any other language in Europe (and probably in the world). To date, there are 23 known translations from the original and far more Russian texts based on the original play. The phenomenon of Hamlet in Russia has been addressed in numerous works;1 in this article I will briefly discuss the specificity of Russian Hamlets in the context of translation theory and canonicity, focusing on the translations that appeared in the post-Soviet period, from 1999 to 2008. As I will attempt to show, the case of Hamlet in post-Soviet Russia can shed some new light on the question of the relation between a translation and its original, which in turn is connected to the “eternal” dispute between practitioners of target culture (TC)- and source culture (SC)-oriented approaches to translation.

1. See Rowe 1976, Clayton 1978, Holland 1999, Semenenko 2007, etc. The scope of the present article limits room for a detailed analysis; the fuller account of the history of Hamlet translations and canon formation in translation is presented in Semenenko 2007.

 Aleksei Semenenko

The dual canon The history of Hamlet in Russia is bound up with the question of literary canon formation.2 The canonization of an original text is similar to the canonization of a translation, with one crucial difference: the status of a canonical translation seems to be explicable through its relation to the original text. A canonical translation differs from a “normal” one also with respect to its status, since it is supposed to represent the national counterpart of a world-renowned text. The whole history of translation, and especially the history of Hamlet translation, proves that diverse interpretations of a play and the competition between these interpretations makes possible the canonization of one (or several) translations. Even outside Shakespeare translation there are countless cases where a translated work in competition with other versions of the same original becomes a classic of a national literature. Thus, any attempt to translate a canonical text is always an attempt to recreate its exceptional position in the target system, as I will attempt to demonstrate here. One of the peculiarities of the Russian Hamlet canon in the nineteenth and twentieth century is its duality. There were simultaneously two canonical translations in each period which coexisted more or less peacefully due to the fact that they occupied different media: literature and the theater. These observations find support in other cases of Shakespeare reception in Europe. Delabatista, for example, confirms in his work on Hamlet in the Netherlands that the reception process “ran along two relatively independent lines, namely in the theatre and in literature” (1993: 221). This difference was partly due to the discrepancy between the theatrical and literary systems, but apart from that, “the introduction of the Shakespearean model was hindered by the predominance of conservative or ‘secondary’ tendencies in the canonized theatre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (ibid.). The same trend was recognized in Germany, France, and other European countries. As Conklin states, in England after 1770 “the emphasis [changed] more noticeably from the spectator to the reader [...] In other words, watching the play [became] an increasingly less important thing” (1957: 29). The “psychologization” of Hamlet in the Romantic period also contributed to its gradual separation from the stage. The history of Hamlet in Russia perfectly reflects this opposition of page/stage. The first Russian translation of Hamlet was made by Mikhail Vrončenko in 1828, but it was Nikolaj Polevoj and Andrej Kroneberg who succeeded in creating the canonical translations of the nineteenth century in 1837 and 1844, respectively. The translations which appeared after the 1840s failed to create a conceptually new canon of Hamlet because they followed either Polevoj’s or Kroneberg’s model, falling into two groups: literature-oriented (Ketčer – 1873, Sokolovskij – 1883, Kanšin – 1893, Averkiev – 1895, 2. Literary canon is defined here as a model of a text which can be used as a pattern for the creation of other texts. See Semenenko 2007: 29–50.



“No text is an island” 

K.R. [Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov] – 1899), and theater-oriented (Zaguljaev – 1861, Maklakov – 1880, Meskovskij – 1889, Gnedič – 1891, Rossov – 1907). Continuous attempts to overturn the canon represented by Polevoj in the theater and Kroneberg in literature merely served to underscore the canonical status of these translations. Of course, Kroneberg’s Hamlet had been performed in the theater as well, and Polevoj’s Hamlet had been republished many times throughout the nineteenth century, but the functional opposition of the translations remained. In the Soviet era the Hamlet canon was once more dual, represented by the “academic” translation of Michail Lozinskij (1933) and the “poetic” translation of Boris Pasternak (1940). The parallels between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are striking. There were two canonical translations in each period, representing two opposing directions, or poles: a written text that is stable and tends to be “accurate” (according to the norms of the period); and a performance text that is multimodal, fluid and dynamic, therefore offering greater latitude to the creative power of the translator and/or director. Insofar as translational practice is concerned, there are two distinct trends in the approaches taken that are directly interrelated with the page/stage opposition. The translations oriented toward the reader tend to be source-oriented and therefore prescriptive. Such were the translations by Vrončenko, Ketčer, Averkiev, K.R. and Lozinskij, for example. We can conventionally call this trend “philological” because its ethos is to “educate” the audience and – more importantly – to convey the canonical status of the work. The opposing trend in translation, which is more TC- and stage-oriented, can accordingly be called “creative” because these translations owe their popularity mostly to the talent of their creators. Another interesting feature of this opposition is that “philological” translations tend to archaize the language and use elevated style (this is especially noticeable in the translations of Vrončenko, K.R., and Lozinskij), whereas the stage-oriented texts usually exploit contemporary vocabulary and modern stylistic figures. In the twenty-first century, these patterns were once again activated.

The new century Before examining the translations of the post-Soviet era, it seems appropriate to outline the cultural context in which they appeared. It has been noted that in times of oppression and state control, socio-political interpretations of Hamlet become especially pronounced.3 In different countries during various periods, Shakespeare’s tragedy has often been used as a kind of Aesopian text, a canonized structure through which writers, directors, and translators could express their critique of the society or regime. In this case Hamlet the character is usually portrayed as a rebel opposing the

3.

See, for example, Holland 1999: 334–5, Stríbrný 2000: 96–139, Makaryk & Price 2006.

 Aleksei Semenenko

authorities (or masses/mainstream, etc.) and is used as a symbol of nonconformism, liberal thinking and dissidence. The period of Hamlet production during the 1950–80s in the Soviet Union was particularly characterized by strong socio-political connotations, as in such world renowned productions as those by N. Ochlopkov, G. Kozincev (1954), J. Ljubimov (1971), and G. Panfilov (1986). These productions are remarkable not only as examples of Hamlet exegesis but also – and perhaps more importantly – as unique documents of their time. Dramatic political changes usually make the texts of previous periods seem obsolete, and at the same time they speed up cultural processes, allowing for shifts in the normative core of the culture. It is not surprising then that after the fall of the Soviet system the focus on Hamlet shifted from socio-political interpretations to aesthetic conceptualizations with a distinct postmodernist flavor. At the millennium, all of the more or less remarkable Hamlet “offshoots” in Russia could be classified as postmodern parodies or pastiches, with their accent on intertextuality, irony and the mixture of contrasting genres. In 1999, the journal Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (35: 95–117) published the first act of Arkadij Zastyrec’s “eccentric comedy,” a burlesque parody of Hamlet. In the late 1990s and early 2000s another Hamlet-related text circulated on the Internet: an obscene travesty of Hamlet entitled Gamlet, abo Fenomen dat´skogo kacapizmu [Hamlet, or The Phenomenon of Danish ‘Kacapizm’4] by Les´ Poderv’jan´skij, written in suržik, a hybrid mixture of Ukrainian and Russian. The text became especially popular among Russian-speaking readers; the use of suržik, combined with grotesque and obscene language, created yet another degree of what the Russian Formalists called defamiliarization (ostranenie) of the classical text and could be compared with the subversive film translations by Goblin (for more on Goblin, see Strukov in this volume). In 2000 Tatjana Achtman’s play Ofelija, Gertruda, Danija i drugie... (Istorija princa Gamleta, raskazannaja Tatjanoj Achtman s ‘ženskoj poloviny’) [Ophelia, Gertrude, Denmark and Others: A Story Told by Tatjana Achtman from the Women’s Side] was published on the Internet. Obviously under the influence of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Achtman turns her attention to the female characters of the play. Achtman introduces Cornelia, Marcella and Reynalda instead of their male counterparts, and Hamlet appears on stage in only one episode, as an actor in a traveling company. Boris Akunin’s Gamlet: Versija (2002) is subtitled Komedija/Tragedija [Hamlet: A Version. Comedy/Tragedy]. In this light detective story the whole action – from the Ghost’s apparition to the poisoned rapiers – turns out to be a well-planned conspiracy accomplished by Fortinbras’s spy Horatio (an ironic play on the conspiratorial theories surrounding Hamlet and Shakespeare’s authorship, popular in the 1990s).

4. ‘Kacap’ is a derogative term for a Russian person in the Ukrainian language.



“No text is an island” 

Finally, one should mention Kirill Serebrennikov’s 2006 film Izobražaja žertvu [Playing the Victim]. The plot of this (black) comedy is formally based on the structure of Hamlet: the protagonist is constantly blathering on about the meaning of life (or the absence thereof), his uncle marries his mother, he sees the ghost of his departed father, etc. The fact that the Hamlet-like hero has a job playing the victim in police murder recreations and that he finally poisons the whole family is an ironic commentary on the eternal dilemma of “To be or not to be.” Perhaps the most important thing is that the allusions to Hamlet in the film have no direct function and serve as an empty signifier, emphasizing the absurdity of the action and life as a whole. In other words, Shakespeare’s classic tragedy fails to elevate or give more profound meaning to the events of the film. As will be obvious from my further analysis, some Hamlet translations of the postSoviet period share many features of these postmodern adaptations and parodies, in some cases challenging the very opposition of translation and original.

1999-Rapoport Vitalij Rapoport is an émigré writer, the author of several short stories and poems. Three of his Shakespeare translations (Hamlet, 1999; Othello and Macbeth, both 2000) were published on the Internet (Rapoport 1999). His translation of Hamlet is preceded by a brief note in which Rapoport expresses his hope that his “new look” at Hamlet is “closer to the original.” However, Rapoport’s translation is characterized primarily by literal translation, “translationese,” and additions and substitutions that are usually simplifications. For example, an inexplicable Russification appears in the expression “Dvorovye rebjata” [friends to the ground; 1.1], which actually means “serfs,” “servants.” Some typical examples of the translator’s contribution are: “Vse ėto mne vnušaet bespokojstvo” [All that troubles me] (A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye; 1.1)5; Ran´še takoj vzgljad na vešči sčitali sliškom meločnym. Ili sliškom tvorčeskim. [This opinion was considered to be too petty. Or too creative.] (’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so; 5.1).

Finally, Rapoport’s poetic skills are generally not very impressive, which is especially noticeable in his rhymed verses, hence the use of ready-made expressions from previous translations, especially Pasternak’s. In summary, the translation is an amateur attempt without any consistent strategy or method. The translation can hardly be called “accurate” or “close to the original” in whatever sense, and its low level of poetic creativity is unlikely to bring it much

5. My close translation of the Russian translation is given in brackets, followed by Shakespeare’s original text.

 Aleksei Semenenko

popularity as an original version. It has passed almost unnoticed in Russia, and it has little hope of receiving any attention in the future.

2001-Poplavskij Vitalij Poplavskij’s Hamlet was printed in 2001 in 1,000 copies. The preface to the translation emphasized the translation’s conformity to modern linguistic and scenic conventions, obviously in an attempt to prepare the reader for the translator’s style. Indeed, from the very first pages it seems that Poplavskij’s use of modern vocabulary and colloquialisms is redundant; such words as triller [thriller], konstruktivnyj dialog [constructive dialogue], teorema [theorem], pohmel´nyj sindrom [alcohol withdrawal syndrome], skafandr [space suit], bzik [oddity], etc., appear in the text, and, apart from that, the overall impression from the dialogues is that all the characters in the play are old friends, hence the familiarity and slang in their speech. The main feature of this translation is its simplification and modernization of the language with a tendency to colloquialize the text. For example, the conversation of Polonius with his daughter resembles teenage talk: he says to her “Kolis´” [Spit it out] and she to him, “Voprosov net” [Deal]. Claudius says to the Queen, “Ne lez´, Gertruda” [Keep out of it, Gertrude]; Laertes utters “O’kej” [Okay] during the duel with Hamlet. The modern slang expressions do indeed make the text sound contemporary, but they also radically alter the stylistics of the play: “Ot choloda ja čut´ ne odurel” [It is so cold I almost went nuts] (‘Tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart; 1.1); “Il´ k čertu na kulički” [Or to hell and gone] (where / Your wisdom best shall think; 3.1). The major tendency of the translation is what may be called the translator’s intrusive creativity in an apparent search for a stronger effect. It manifests itself in his replacing of Shakespeare’s phrases (and not necessarily the tropes) with Poplavskij’s own wording, which sometimes has only an associative relation to the original. A single example should suffice: “brokery fal´šivych sdelok” [stock brokers of false bargains] (for they are brokers, / Not of that dye which their investments show, 1.3) – the words “broker” and “investments” are taken literally in the modern context, hence sdelki which is added by association. An even more striking example is Hamlet’s unexpected switch to German in the conversation with Ghost: “O mein Gott!” (O my prophetic soul; 1.4) – perhaps a reference to Hamlet’s Wittenberg background. The modern idioms and slang Poplavskij injects into the tragic context result in a stylistic dissonance that pervades the entire text and produces a double effect – as if one were reading a parody of Hamlet, a burlesque adaptation for the local school theater. In Jurij Tynjanov’s (1977: 290) terms, Poplavskij uses the parodistic form in a nonparodic function in order to create a new text based on a canonical model. With respect to the dichotomy of translation methods, Poplavskij’s Hamlet can be classified as a follower of a “creative” line, and so implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) in competition with Pasternak’s translation.



“No text is an island” 

2001-Koršunova The same year Poplavskij’s translation appeared, 500 copies of Nadežda Koršunova’s translation were published in Ivanovo. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to obtain the book now, and I have managed to find only two references to this text. The marginality of this translation can be explained in part by its genre: the title of the translation reads, Hamlet. A Translation of W. Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Essays. Excursuses into the Text. Apparently, the book is not “just a translation” but also a separate esoteric study of the tragedy with some extraordinary metaphysical insights (see Spivakovskij 2004 and Peškov 2005: 352). For one reason or another, Koršunova’s translation passed almost unnoticed in Russian literary life, unlike the new Hamlet translated by Andrej Černov.

2002-Černov Andrej Černov is a poet and mathematician born in Leningrad in 1953. He has published works on the medieval Russian epic Slovo o polku Igoreve [The Tale of Igor’s Campaign], Puškin and the Decembrists. Černov began translating Hamlet in 1997. Not being proficient in English, he consulted various specialists in the course of his work. It seems in fact that he translated not directly from the original but rather from Michail Morozov’s 1954 prose version. Peškov expresses the same suspicion in his article (2005: 362). Černov’s Hamlet is the most successful new translation so far: it has undergone two editions, in 2002 and 2003, in Moscow and Paris, respectively. In October 2002 it was used in Dmitrij Krymov’s production at the Stanislavskij Theater in Moscow. Since then it has not been staged again. Apart from the translation, the book contains a preface, commentaries and several papers entitled “Notes on Hamlet,” all of which are presented as supporting material for Černov’s interpretation of the text which, he states, has not been correctly “deciphered” by generations of Shakespeare scholars. Briefly, his hypothesis maintains that the play is about Horatio, who only pretends to be Hamlet’s friend but in reality is a cold-blooded villain and probably a murderer. There is a hint of his treacherous nature in his very name. According to Černov, Horatio is a compound name, Ho + ratio, where ho is a homophone of “whore” (to a Russian ear this many indeed be true), and ratio is Latin for “reason.” Thus, concludes Černov, Horatio stands for “a pragmatic whore” (Černov 2003: 216, 266–7). Moreover, he is an “Italian Swiss guard” like Francisco, Reynaldo and Barnardo, because their names all end in “-o.” But the most important revelation of the text is that Ophelia is pregnant – by Hamlet, of course. Černov’s apologia for his method (why one should “decipher” the text in this manner in the first place) is provided in the “Notes.” The translator treats Hamlet as a typical esoteric (and/or sacred) text, complexly encoded on different levels through riddles, plays on words and sense, hidden anagrams and keys, etc. Černov’s task is thus to decode the text and to “reconstruct Shakespeare’s intention” in his translation.

 Aleksei Semenenko

The structure of the play, in Černov’s opinion, is also very different from the traditional perceptions. First of all, Černov maintains that Shakespeare’s play originally included an undocumented pantomime which was no less important for the action. This intermission, in which Horatio watches Ophelia drown (if he does not directly kill her), is “reconstructed” by Černov. Second, the chronological course of the play is cut into six days corresponding to the six days of Creation (the tragedy ends on Friday, which is the day of Christ’s crucifixion). Finally, the play is divided into three acts instead of the conventional five – Černov ignores the fact that in Shakespeare’s time this division did not exist at all – in order to correspond to another logic, that of the golden mean. Moreover, the play’s space is also divided into three: the outdoor scenes, scenes in the state room, and scenes in other rooms. In conformity with Černov’s calculations of words and characters in the text, the three acts of the play (and three types of scene) correspond to each other following the rule of the golden mean. The function of this division is in fact to confirm Černov’s hypothesis of the missing pantomime in the third act. His interpretation is so complex that it can hardly be fully implemented in the translation itself, and Černov therefore uses ample commentaries and notes. One of the most conspicuous features of Černov’s translation is its smooth language. Černov is definitely better at versification than his three immediate predecessors; his text is fluent, as if ready-made for enunciation, although by the same token he sometimes treats the original as a springboard for free adaptation. Thus, some passages and Hamlet’s soliloquies (except “To be or not to be”) are rhymed in the translation, as, for example, in scene 4.4. The tendency to treat the monologues as if they were separate lyrical poems is not new in the history of Hamlet translation. Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many translators chose to translate the soliloquies first, starting with the “to be” soliloquy, and probably only then would turn to the rest of the tragedy. Černov obviously chooses the less canonical parts of the text to exercise his own poetic skill. For example (3.4):

Koroleva: Uvy, čto ni otvet, to nevpopad. Gamlet: Nu da, ved´ iz voprosa kaplet jad.



[Queen: Alas, your answers are amiss. Hamlet: Well, yes, because the poison is dripping from your questions.]



(Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue. Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.)

In the first edition of the translation these lines were much more provocative:

Koroleva: Vy govorite, točno pustomelja. Gamlet: Vy govorite, točno iz bordelja.6

6. It was used in the 2002 theater production and infuriated the critics: see Dina Goder in Eženedel´nyj žurnal 1.11.2002; Aleksandr Sokoljanskij in Vremja novostej 28.10.2002 and Natal´ja Kaminskaja in Kul´tura 31.10.2002.



“No text is an island” 



[Queen: You speak as a blabbermouth. Hamlet: You speak as if you are from the brothel.]

Here we observe the same approach as in Poplavskij’s translation, which is to offer an ingenious version of some well-known passages. The most illustrative example is the rendition of the “to be” soliloquy, where an attempt to be original and to escape the “all-seeing eye” of the previous canon has turned the translation into a sort of thematic variation. Černov even “corrected” the most canonical line of the tragedy, “To be or not to be.” In the Russian tradition, very few translators have attempted to change the canon of “Byt´´ili/il´ ne byt´ – vot v čem/takov vopros” (Sokolovskij, Kanšin, Meskovskij, and Averkiev), and they all failed in their attempts. Černov’s variant is “Tak byt´ili ne byt´?.. Nu i vopros! [So, to be or not to be? What a question!]” The translator argues that it is rhythmically more adequate. In other instances Černov resorts to the text of his main rival, Pasternak. For example: Černov: Polzučee zlodejstvo, a po-datski – zmeju podkolodnuju [The crawling evil, or, in Danish, “a serpent in the grass”]; Pasternak: “Zmeja podkolodnaja”, a označaet temnoe delo. [“A serpent in the grass,” and it means shady business]; (Shakespeare: Marry, this is miching malecho. It means mischief; 3.2).

Some scenes are rendered in accordance with Černov’s interpretation; for example, in one of her songs, Ophelia sings “Slavnyj Robin, moj malyš, – / Vsja radost´ moja” [Sweet Robin, my baby, / Is all my joy] (For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy, 4.5). Černov maintains that Robin is the name of the baby she is expecting, hence the addition in the translation: “my baby.” Moreover, as Černov explains in a separate endnote, in scene 5.1, the priest refuses to bury Ophelia not because she committed suicide but because she was not a virgin. The text therefore has been altered to conform to the translator’s hypothesis. The “maiden strewments” and “virgin rites” are eliminated from the priest’s speech because they contradict the interpretation. Because Černov neither offers any additional evidence in support of his hypothesis nor seriously alters the text to make his idea more explicit, most of his interpretive exercises are to be found in the commentaries and accompanying essays. In this respect the theater production turned out to be more conservative. Dmitrij Krymov’s theatrical innovations in the 2002 Moscow production based on Černov’s translation were not revolutionary: Fortinbras is eliminated from the action, the play within the play becomes a puppet-show, and the “to be” soliloquy turns into a dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia. The critics were almost unanimous in their overall negative and somewhat bewildered attitude toward the translation and production.7 Many noted the inappropriate casting of Valerij Garkalin, popular for his comic 7. Most reviews are collected at the theater chronicle website at http://www.smotr. ru/2002/2002_stan_hamlett.htm

 Aleksei Semenenko

parts, in the role of the Prince of Denmark, but on the other hand, almost every reviewer mentioned Nikolaj Volkov’s outstanding performance as Claudius. The unsophisticated scenography and amateurish directing were criticized as well, but most criticism targeted the translation itself, which was inevitably and negatively compared with Pasternak’s. Černov’s translation is surprisingly similar to Koršunova’s in its treatment of Hamlet as an esoteric text, open to endless interpretation. The focus thus shifts from the actual play to its metatexts, and the commentator (translator) receives almost unlimited power. The important point is that the manifested intertextuality becomes the main feature of the translated text.

2003-Peškov Other than Rapoport’s translation, Peškov’s version is the first serious recent attempt to continue the line of accuracy-oriented translations of Hamlet. The translation was published in 2003 in 2,000 copies), and the edition is bilingual, which has precedents in Russian history (beginning with K.R.’s translation in 1899), but it is the first time a Russian translator has attempted to compile a single text of the original out of the existing variants Q2 and F1, indicating the difference between them with special typographic marks in the text. In the preface to the translation Peškov claims that he first translated the text and only then compared his version with the translations by Kroneberg, K.R., Lozinskij, Radlova, Pasternak and Morozov, to which he refers with the generalized term “the tradition.” Quite expectedly, he chooses as the main axis of comparison Lozinskij’s translation, the canonical text of the “philological,” reader-oriented tendency. The alternative “traditional” variants are provided in the notes together with Peškov’s critical commentary. Peškov (2003: xix) declares that the main goal of his translation is not to evaluate the previous tradition and its aesthetic value but to provide space for “a more accurate conceptualization of the obscurities of the original.” He indicates that the instances where he argues with “the tradition” total four hundred, and his translation is thus supposed to show a better approximation to the original than the antecedent variants. Let us take a look at some of his “improvements.” 1. “The sledded Polacks” (1.1) turned into a person’s name, Pollak. No justification is given for this interpretation. In the same manner “for England” is translated as “dlja Anglija,” making England a proper name. 2. One of the stumbling stones of Hamlet translation, the words “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” (3.2) are translated as “Ledi, mogu ja leč´ v vašej rasseline?” [May I lie in your crack?]. Peškov used this non-trivial meaning as a wordplay on Hamlet’s next remark: “Ja imeju v vidu, rasselit´ golovu u vas na kolenjach?” [I mean may I settle my head upon your lap?]; (I mean my head upon your lap?). However, the



“No text is an island” 

next attempt to preserve two meanings of the word maid makes the phrase sound somewhat strange: “Eto blestjaščaja mysl´ – ležat´ mež nog devstvennoj prislugi” [... between the legs of a virgin maidservant]; (That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs). 3. “Kol´ ne pochož sovsem korol´ naš na komed´, / Čto ž v nej, moj bog, ne smog, pochože, on sterpet´?” [For if the King does not look like a comedy...]; (For if the King like not the comedy, / Why then, belike he likes it not, pardie; 3.2). The fifth word in this phrase (like) in Peškov’s account is not a verb but an adverb, meaning “alike.” The grammatical incorrectness of the phrase in this interpretation fails to deter him. These examples are illustrative enough. Peškov does not so much “correct the mistakes” as offer a complex and original exegesis of the text; and it seems that in his translation originality sometimes takes priority over declared accuracy and approximation to the original. Moreover, the translator’s poor (or imaginary) command of English often complicates the situation even more. One of the main problems of the translation is its labored and inconsistent style. For example, the phrase “Ne daj krovati datskich korolej / Roskošnym logovom byt´ adskogo incesta” [Do not let the bed of Danish kings / Be a luxurious lair of infernal incest] (Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest; 1.5) is a combination of the oxymoron roskošnoe logovo (luxurious lair) and the specific term incest, which in its turn sounds dissonant with the epithet adskij (hellish, infernal). Such lexical eclecticism produces an incongruous or even comic effect. It is doubtful that a publisher or an editor preparing the text for either the general public or a school anthology – which usually imposes additional requirements on the translation – would prefer Peškov’s variant over Lozinskij’s, for example. Having renounced poeticity in favor of philological accuracy (often very disputable, as we have seen), the translator, however, provides often subjective and questionable interpretations presented in a labored (one might even say “antipoetic”) style. Talking in terms of tradition, the spirit of Vrončenko is hovering over Peškov’s translation. Although Peškov has quite clearly expressed his dislike of Černov’s translation, their Hamlets are paradoxically similar in one aspect: in both versions, the text itself is overshadowed and even suppressed by the translator’s metatexts, whether Černov’s “reconstruction” of the hidden message or Peškov’s presupposed “correct translation” of the text. Both share the assumption that there is one and only one “correct” meaning to be extracted from Shakespeare’s text. It is somewhat paradoxical that although the translators deny any multiplicity of meaning of the text, their interpretations in fact dramatically extend the boundaries of Hamlet, thus justifying the name of “the poem unlimited.”

 Aleksei Semenenko

2008-Cvetkov Aleksej Cvetkov is a poet and dissident, born in 1947 in Ukraine. He emigrated from the USSR in mid-70s, and now lives in the United States. What is peculiar about his translation is that it has not been published yet as a final version, neither in print nor digitally; however, Cvetkov has been sharing the text with the readers of his blog at aptsvet.livejournal.com. Since fall 2007 Cvetkov has been publishing the translation scene by scene in his LJ blog. The complete draft version was posted on March 21, 2008, as a separate MS Word file, available for download.8 This translation is especially interesting for its interactive discussion between the translator and the readers (mostly LJ users who can be totally or partially anonymous). Of course, Cvetkov is far from taking into account every suggestion or comment but he welcomed the “constructive criticism” and discussed the proposed variants with his audience, most of the times defending his choice. In several postings, Cvetkov in a rather impressionistic manner presents his views on Shakespeare translation. According to Cvetkov, Shakespeare is the greatest poet who simply cannot be adequately translated into Russian. Cvetkov expectedly rejects previous translations of Hamlet and explains his attempt to translate this play once more by his aspiration “to protect the universal endowment from mutilation.” He also claims that he strives to translate the play “as a poem, line by line, trying to convey the meaning of the original as closely as possible,” and with the “minimum violation of the Russian language.” The most symptomatic of Cvetkov’s “accuratist” declarations is the explicit dislike of Pasternak (especially in the posting of December 14, 2007), whom he accuses of “distortion” of the original Shakespearean text and of incompetence in the English language. In reality Cvetkov’s translation is characterized by three main features: first, it tends to be literalist; second, it is quite different from Cvetkov’s own poetic manner; third, Cvetkov, as Peškov, offers original interpretations of some obscurities of the play. For example, a strange epithet in the actor’s speech (2.2), “mobled queen,” is translated as “carica v parandže” [queen in hijab]. Cvetkov follows one of the interpretations that the queen’s head is muffled in cloth because she is running through the burning city. Cvetkov uses the unexpected word “hijab” in order to convey the strangeness of the phrase and to justify Hamlet’s reaction. Another example is Hamlet’s obscene wordplay in scene 3.2:

Gamlet. Ofelija. Gamlet. Ofelija. Gamlet.

A vy dumali, ja imel v vidu gluposti? U menja v mysljach dyra, milord. Ėta mysl´ umestna meždu devič´ich nog. Kakaja, milord? Da tak, tože dyra v mysljach.

8. When this article had been completed, a part of Cvetkov’s translation (Act 5, Scene 2) was published in the journal Novyj Mir (No 8, 2008). This text was identical to the Internet version.



“No text is an island” 



[Do you think I meant some nonsense? I have a hole in my thoughts, my lord. This thought is appropriate between maids’ legs. Which one, my lord? Nothing, my thoughts are also about the hole.]



(Do you think I meant country matters? I think nothing, my lord. That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. What is, my lord? No thing.)

The example of the “to be” soliloquy is quite emblematic for the literalist tendency of the translation. When the soliloquy was first published on December 17, 2007, one of the users commented on the unpronouncability of the fourth and fifth lines: “Ili protivostat´ morjam trevog / I past´, protivostav? Skončat´sja, spat´...” Cvetkov rejected the criticism stating that a professional actor would have no problems saying this. Later, he touched upon this question one more time, arguing that Shakespeare on the whole is hard to pronounce, and so must itself be a translation. Cvetkov attempted to recreate the original “density of the text” by using clashing consonants and paronyms in the translation, thus contradicting his own statement concerning “the minimum violation” of the Russian language. To be absolutely correct, Cvetkov’s translation cannot be considered the last Russian translation of Hamlet until the final version has been published, in print or on the Internet, and that version may be quite different from the present variant. However, we should note that Cvetkov continues the literalist trend, choosing Pasternak as his main protagonist.

Concluding remarks All of the Hamlet translations discussed above share several common features. First, many translators begin with a certain apologia: one has to prove – at least to himself – that his status as a translator and as a poet is sufficient for this “great task.” Second, whether or not the translators explicitly state it, they modernize the text and render Shakespeare’s language in the context of Russian contemporary vocabulary and idioms. The other conspicuous feature is that the translators use canonical texts as a frame or pattern for their own creative and interpretive experiments. Thus, the most original new versions are intended to be perceived against the background of the “more traditional variants”; in other words, they perform a “minus-function,” producing their effect by frustrating the expectations of the reader familiar with the canon. As a result, the translators really strive not to translate the text, but to give an original interpretation of individual passages. The reason is often quite obvious but usually

 Aleksei Semenenko

implicit: to write one’s name in the history of Hamlet. In that sense, Pasternak and Lozinskij are chosen as the main antagonists, and their texts serve as a “fiducial point” for the new translator. In addition to that, all Russian Hamlets of the post-Soviet period, regardless of contrasting approaches to translation, are characterized by some typical postmodern features. They explore the intertextuality of the text and concentrate on its “external” features (commentaries, interpretations, and other metatexts): Poplavskij and Černov exploit the parodistic function of the translation; Koršunova and Černov treat the text as an esoteric code and offer elaborate exegeses; Peškov and Cvetkov demonize the elusive idea of the “sacred original” and explicitly foreignize the translated text. In other words, every translation is perceived as “a text within the text” rather than as an attempt to represent the original in the national culture. Most likely that was the reason why these texts have not been fully received by Russian culture. This short account of recent Hamlet translations in Russia has demonstrated that the factor that plays a pivotal role in the success or failure of a Hamlet translation is its relation to the previous canon and that translations (at least in the case of canonical texts) depend not really on the source text but on the complex intertextual (and intersemiotic) relations among translations in the target culture. The literary system constantly requires new texts for its stable development, which makes the factor of novelty in the recipient system the main factor of literary translatability. This also means that any new canon appears as a “counteragent” to the previous canon, and every translator in any given period enters the complex system of literary/ cultural conventions which establishes the normative field of the translation act. The work of the translator is thus necessarily related to this normative field by opposition, concurrence and/or modification, and can never be perceived outside of it. On a larger scale, the problem of canons in translation makes us (translators and translation scholars) revisit and reformulate the very idea of the translation act. For example, Lawrence Venuti describes translation as a process “by which the chain of signifiers that constitutes the source-language text is replaced by a chain of signifiers in the target language which the translator provides on the strength of an interpretation” (1995: 17). This generally accepted scheme seems logical but at the same time is quite misleading because it emphasizes the process of replacement (one cannot replace something if it is not there yet) and also focuses on signifiers rather than on texts. In reality, the central process of the translation act is not replacement but, on the contrary, addition, creation. A new translation is thus a systematically structured text that is created in the existing network of relations of a given culture, linked to a potentially unlimited number of contexts, both literary and extraliterary, domestic and foreign. To reconstruct this concrete semiosphere, to use Lotman’s term, or the specific network of semiotic relations in every case of translation can be considered the primary task of the translation scholar.



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Works cited Achtman, T. Ofelija, Gertruda, Danija i drugie... (Istorija princa Gamleta, raskazannaja Tatjanoj Achtman s ‘ženskoj poloviny’). Available online: http://www.netslova.ru/akhtman/ofelia. html (Accessed 22.09.2008). Černov, Andrej (trans). 2003. U. Šekspir.Gamlet: Tragedija Gamleta, princa datskogo: P´esa v trech aktach, by William Shakespeare. Moskva-Pariž: Izografus. Clayton, J. Douglas. 1978. “The Hamlets of Turgenev and Pasternak: On the Role of Poetic Myth in Literature.” Germano-Slavica 2.6: 455–61. Delabastita, Dirk. 1993. “Hamlet in the Netherlands in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Complexities of the History of Shakespeare’s Reception.” In European Shakespeares: Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age, edited by Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D’Hulst, 219–234. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: J. Benjamins. Holland, Peter. 1999. “‘More a Russian than a Dane’: The Usefulness of Hamlet in Russia.” In Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, edited by Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead, 315–338. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Makaryk, Irena and Joseph G. Price (eds). 2006. Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Peškov, Igor. 2005. “Est’ mnogoe na svete: Vrag Goracio i t.p., ili perevody šekspirovskogo Gamleta kak povod dlja sensacii.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 72: 351–363. Peškov, Igor (trans). 2003. Šekspir Gamlet (V poiskach podlinnika) Moskva: Labirint. Poplavskij, Vitalij (trans). 2001. V. Šekspir Tragičeskaja istorija Gamleta, datskogo princa, by William Shakespeare. Moskva: Žuravlev. Rapoport, Vitalij (trans). 1999. Tragedija Gamleta, princa datskogo Available online: http://lib. ru/SHAKESPEARE/haml_rap.txt (Accessed 12 July 2006). Rowe, Eleanor. 1976. Hamlet: A Window on Russia. New York: New York University Press. Semenenko, Aleksei. 2007. Hamlet the Sign: Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation. Almqvist & Wiksell International. Spivakovskij, Aleksandr. 2004. “22 Gamleta i odin Šekspir (Tradicii i novacii pročtenija tragedii Gamlet U. Šekspira).” Sibirskie ogni 4. Available online: http://www.hrono.ru/text/2004/ spi0404.html (Accessed 12 July 2008). Stríbrný, Zdeněk. 2000. Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Oxford University Press. Tynjanov, Jurij. 1977. Poėtika. Istorija literatury. Kino. Moskva: Nauka. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.

Russian dystopia in exile Translating Zamiatin and Voinovich Natalia Olshanskaya

Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, USA This chapter describes how two Russian dystopian novels, Evgenii Zamiatin’s We (1921) and Vladimir Voinovich’s Moscow 2042 (1987) reached their readers through translations. The analysis centers on similarities and differences in the presentation of the dystopian world in modern and post-modern discourses and their translations into English. The author argues that dystopia, a genre well established in the Western literary tradition, encounters many more difficulties in reaching the readership of the target culture in its postmodern form.

Introduction From the early nineteen twenties on, the social criticism of dystopian novels made them unwanted by the Soviet regime and unacceptable for publication. As a result, dystopia was either written by Russian writers living in exile or, if authored by those still residing in the Soviet Union, could be published only in the West. Not infrequently these publications then forced the authors to emigrate.1 Ousted from its own country by the political and aesthetic constraints imposed by Soviet censorship, the genre as a whole had to adopt the status of an “immigrant.” Thus, Russian dystopian novels have acquired most of their popularity through translation. The history of the translation and publication of two Russian dystopian novels, Evgenii Zamiatin’s We, which has become a world classic and an important part of all major anthologies of dystopian literature, and a more recent novel, Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich, provokes interesting observations about the influence of translation practices on the politics of inter-cultural communication, and more specifically, on the development of the genre of literary dystopia. It also gives further insights into the differences in the interpretation and reception of modern and postmodern translated texts by receiving cultures. 1. For a detailed study of the suppression of intellectual dissent by the Soviet regime during the first three decades of the twentieth century and its impact on writers’ emigration, see Raeff 1990.

 Natalia Olshanskaya

The dawn of soviet dystopia Evgenii Zamiatin’s We (My) was completed in 1921, and although its forthcoming publication was announced in Russia, at that time the book was not to be published there since the Soviet cultural authorities immediately sensed too many parallels between Soviet society and the dystopian world of the novel. We first appeared in its English translation in 1924, in New York. The same year, the publication of the original Russian version of the novel was banned in the Soviet Union. A Czech translation of We was published in 1927 by the Lidova Knihovna Aventina Publishers; a French translation appeared in 1929; the Russian text came out in 1952 in New York at the Chekhov Publishing House. The novel finally reached its readers in the Soviet Union only in 1988, sixty seven years later. The life of We in translation has an extraordinary history. After its publication in 1924 in New York, the English translation was used as a point of reference by its Czech and later by its French publishers. Roman Jakobson, who was living in Prague at the time when Vaclav Koenig was working on the first Czech translation, wrote to Zamiatin on several occasions about problems with the forthcoming publication and requested a copy of the English translation: “We need at least one copy of the English book. Please let us know who the publisher was and when it appeared” (Zamiatin 1988: 526). A similar request was expressed by the French translator Cauvet-Duhmel and the French publisher.2 In 1927, Marc Slonim, then the literary editor of Volia Rossii, an emigré Russian monthly published in Prague, obtained the Russian manuscript of We and wanted to introduce the readers of his magazine to it. Realizing that it might cause trouble for the author, who still lived in Russia, he pretended that his publication was a translation from the Czech version. To give weight to this assertion, he changed and reworded some passages of the original. “I must say that crippling and distorting Zamiatin’s concise and beautiful prose made me feel like a criminal,” he later confessed (Slonim 1959: xxv). The publications of We in its various translations were not followed by any major negative reaction on the part of the Soviet authorities. According to Zamiatin, he had mentioned the existence of these translations in the Russian press, and “had never heard a single word of protest against their publication.”3 Yet, the appearance of the Russian version in Volia Rossii caused an open political campaign against Zamiatin in 2. Clarence Brown, one of the most recent translators of We, argues that it was evidently the publishers who needed the English text, not the French translator Cauvet-Duhmel, since his version seems to be much more accurate than the first English translation by Gregory Zilboorg (Brown 1993: xii). 3. Zamiatin had to make a public statement that the Russian text of We had been published abroad without his consent. His letters with a detailed explanation of circumstances under which he had learned about the publication of his novel appeared in the newspaper Literaturnaia Gazeta in October 1929 (Annenkov 1997: 496).



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the Soviet Union, and in 1931 he wrote a letter to Stalin requesting permission to emigrate (Zamiatin 1967: 275–282).4 In his Foreword to the first English translation, Grigory Zilboorg wrote: This is perhaps the first time in Russian history of the last few decades that a Russian book, inspired by Russian life, written in the Russian language, should see its first light not in Russia but abroad, and not in the language in which it was originally written, but translated into a foreign tongue. [...] This situation, however, is to a great extent symbolic of the spiritual mission of Zamiatin, for no matter what the language in which he writes originally, and no matter how typically national his artistic perception and intuition, he is essentially universal, and his vision transcends the boundaries of a purely national art. (Zilboorg 1924: xiii-xiv)

Indeed, it was this universality of subject matters in We that turned it into a literary classic, and made it so popular among readers and writers of dystopian novels across cultures. Like other manifestations of the dystopian genre, We attacks utilitarianism and the myth of a happy, mechanized existence created by a totalitarian system. It depicts an autocratic world where people have neither privacy nor freedom, where inhabitants live under the permanent surveillance of the secret police, where any violation of the strictly imposed regulations is mercilessly punished. This artificially constructed universe is not limited to a particular time or any recognizable place; it does not bear specifically Russian cultural or political trademarks. Such a generalized approach to the portrayal of evil in totalitarian states has contributed to the crosscultural appeal of Zamiatin’s text. The cross-cultural universality of We has attracted many English-language, translators: Grigory Zilboorg’s 1924 version was followed by those of Bernard Guilbert Guerney (1960), Mirra Ginsburg (1972), Samuel Cioran (1987), Alex Miller (1991), Clarence Brown (1993), and Natasha Randall (2006). As one of the authors of the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English has indicated, “it is ...a little surprising to see no fewer than six translations of a novel by a writer who hardly commands the reputation of a Tolstoi or Dostoevskii” (Scherr 2000: 1510). At first glance, Zamiatin’s prose does not present too many challenges for translators. Written in the form of a diary, the narrative employs a stylistically neutral vocabulary with almost no use of colloquial or dialectal words, which are traditionally believed to be problematic when transferred into another language. And yet, Zamiatin’s syntax, and his carefully structured rhythmic patterns have posed certain problems regarding the choice of translation strategies.5 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who in his comments on We suggested that its style was “artistically bright, even blinding,” gave the following description of Zamiatin’s 4. The English version of this letter, translated by Mirra Ginsburg, appeared in 1970 (Ginsburg 1970: 305–309). 5. In his comments on the language of another famous Russian dystopia Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, Joseph Brodskii calls Zamiatin “a stylistic epicure” (Brodskii 1997: 551).

 Natalia Olshanskaya

narrative: “His artistic style is abrupt and expressive; his narrative is energetic, without long descriptions. The minute he has outlined the situation and the character, he won’t use a single extra word” (Solzhenitsyn 1997: 101). Mirra Ginsburg, whose translation is reputed as one of the finest, has commented on the “astonishing discipline” of Zamiatin’s style: “We, about the square state and square men, is written in a style of utmost severity and discipline – a style in perfect harmony with the author’s intention, with the totally controlled society he evokes...” (Ginsburg 1972: xiv-xv). In We, a combination of deliberate impartiality in the descriptions and extreme inner tension in the narrative is often achieved through the repetition of short elliptical sentences, the frequent use of inverted word-order, and the introduction of numerous detached elements. An expressive, rhythmic narrative structure is formed through the contextual interaction of long and short, simple and compound or complex sentences. Although it is believed that these elements of syntax should not present major difficulties in their transposition from Russian into English, the variety of strategies employed by translators has had an obvious impact on the pragmatic equivalence of the source and target texts and consequently on the reception of We in the Englishlanguage culture. The following short examples from four translations have been chosen to illustrate some of the most typical tendencies in the attempt to reproduce the syntactic peculiarities of We in English.

(1) Vot odin – stoial na stupeniakh nalitogo solntsem Kuba. Beloe... I dazhe net – ne beloe, a uzh bez zveta – stekliannoe litso, stekliannye guby (Zamiatin 1997: 106). (2) That one stood on the steps of the Cube which was filled with sunlight. A white, no not even white but already colorless, glass face, lips of glass (Zilboorg 1924: 44). (3) There: one unit was standing on the steps of the sunswollen Cube. A white face (well, not actually white, but colourless by now), a glassy face, with glassy lips (Guerney 1970: 75). (4) Now a single one – was standing on the steps of the sun-washed Cube. A white... but not actually, not a white, but rather colorless now – a glass face, glass lips (Cioran 1987: 30). (5) There was one... standing on the steps of the Cube, the sunlight pouring down on him. His face was white, or no, not white, it was no color at all, his glass face, glass lips (Brown 1993: 45–6).

The two earliest versions, those of Zilboorg and Guerney, are highly readable. Both translators achieve a seamless fluency in the target texts by adjusting Zamiatin’s syntax to English language norms.6 In fact, Zilboorg’s version reflects tendencies typical of 6. As Mona Baker states in her definition of “initial form” in translation, “adherence to norms originating in the target culture determines its acceptability within the culture” (Baker 1998: 164). See also: Hermans 1996: 24.



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the first half of the twentieth century in translating from Russian into English: his technique is clearly “domesticating,” and while he is less attentive to the writer’s style, he extremely accurate in the reproduction of the literal meaning of the words. As an example of this accuracy, it seems appropriate to mention here that Zilboorg is the only translator who throughout the novel gives the correct equivalent for the Russian color purpurnyi (bright red), translated by others as “purple.” This seemingly minor detail is contextually important in several parts of the narrative, since it creates a series of complex images. For example, in the ninth chapter, or Record Nine, as it is called in the novel, “the red blood-colored flower-like lips of women” are further associated with the bright red (not the “purple!”) ribbon which chains the hands of the victim and implies the idea of blood to be spilt at the end of the festivities. Several similar semantic losses are caused by the misrepresentation of this color in most Englishlanguage versions of We. Cioran tries to match the rhythmic irregularity of the original by preserving most of the detached elliptical elements separated by numerous dashes, less common for English syntax, which seem to “foreignize” his translation.7 He also splits the narrative into smaller paragraphs which reinforce the same effect. A well-balanced, subtle approach is taken by Brown who, according to Scherr, “manages to convey most nuances of the original precisely while writing in English that compares favorably to Zamiatin’s masterly Russian” (Scherr 2000: 1510). With all due respect to the successful efforts of more recent translators, it still seems possible to suggest that Zilboorg’s and Guerney’s conservative, and in a way dated, “domesticating” translation strategies have paved the way for the assimilation of We into the target-language culture, allowing subsequently for further translation experiments. Literary critics have often referred to the importance of We for the development of the dystopian genre and to the numerous parallels between such classical literary dystopias as Zamiatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Brown 1976; Glenny 1970: 21–22; Steinhoff 1975). It is generally agreed that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was influenced in many ways by Zamiatin’s We, which Orwell first read in the French translation. Several years before publishing his review of We in The Tribune, Orwell wrote in a letter to a friend, the literary scholar Gleb Struve: “I am interested in that kind of book and even keep making notes for one myself that may get written sooner or later” (Fenwick 1998: 126).8 The transposition of the Soviet totalitarian system from Zamiatin’s dystopia onto British soil in Nineteen Eighty-Four allows us to reiterate obvious conclusions regarding 7. Lawrence Venutti describes “foreignizing” as development of a translation discourse which in its deviation from dominant linguistic norms “brings the awareness that the translation is only a translation, imprinted with domestic intelligibilities and interests, and therefore not to be confused with the foreign text” (Venuti 1998: 86). 8. The review of We, “Freedom and Happiness,” first appeared in The Tribune No. 471 (January 4, 1946: 15–16), reprinted in Orwell 1970: 95–99.

 Natalia Olshanskaya

the influence of translations on literary interactions in general and on the development of literary genres in particular. As Mikhail Bakhtin wrote in The Dialogic Imagination, “It could even be said that European novel prose is born and shaped in the process of a free (that is, reformulating) translation of other works” (Bakhtin 1981: 378).

Moscow 2042: Postmodern dystopia in translation A very different example of translation and reception of dystopia is presented by the postmodern novel Moscow 2042 (Moskva 2042) by Vladimir Voinovich. As any other post-modern text with its irony, self-referentiality, and intertextuality, it has posed a much more challenging task for translators and especially for readers in the receiving cultures. Vladimir Voinovich’s novel Moscow 2042 invites the reader on a nightmarish journey into the future where well-known absurdities of Soviet life are hyperbolized to create the most corrupt totalitarian world that one could imagine. The novel was first published in Russian in 1986 in the USA (Ann Arbor); its translation into English by Richard Lourie, Moscow 2042, came out a year later in San Diego; it finally reached its Russian readers in 1996. Moscow 2042, Voinovich’s first novel written in the West, is a linear descendant of Zamiatin’s and Orwell’s dystopian tradition, and one can easily trace numerous similarities in the themes, events, chronotopes, and other structural elements of the three novels. The title of Voinovich’s novel is already an indirect allusion to Orwell. Protected by concrete walls and barbed wire, Voinovich’s city-state Moscowrep recalls Zamiatin’s glass-walled city Jedinoe gosudarstvo or the enclosed world of Orwell’s Ingsoc. The function of Moscowrep’s Genialissimo (super-genius, or “Genialissimo” in the English version) parallels that of Zamiatin’s Blagodetel’(“Benevolent Dictator” or “Benefactor” in some translations) or Orwell’s Big Brother. In all the three novels, the plot is organized around an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the existing regime, and the main characters’ failure is described through a love affair.9 In addition to thematic and structural parallels, these novels seem to have one more important feature in common: the prophetic nature of their messages, which offers profound insights into the hopelessness of revolutionary experiments in Russia or elsewhere. In Moscow 2042, Voinovich predicted not only such major unfortunate developments in Russian history as the economic and political chaos of the post-communist regime, but also some minor, anecdotal ones. The overstated importance of 9. A lack of interest in the development of plot on the part of dystopian authors has been mentioned by Peter Bowering in his study of Auldous Huxley’s novels: “[T]here is little interest in the elements of form and structure, the characters do not develop and the plot is minimal. What we have in their place might be described as a highly charged dialectic of ideas shaped in the form of a moral fable” (Bowering 1969: 5).



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Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia in 1994 seems to have been staged in accordance with the scenario from the chapter “Astride a White Steed”; today’s exaggerated role of the Russian Orthodox Church in all spheres of public and private lives recalls the bizarre blending of Christianity and Communism in the novel’s Moscowrep; and it is impossible not to notice certain biographical parallels between Russia’s former president Putin and Moscowrep’s Genialissimo, who both started their careers as undercover agents in Germany. A comparison of Voinovich’s Moscow 2042 with the classic dystopian novels shows a similar tension between continuity and innovation operating at every level of literary creation. While borrowing many of the generic conventions employed by his illustrious predecessors and bringing them to bear in an updated critique of the same society, Voinovich adopts with respect to his own discourse a critical distance which is peculiarly postmodern. In place of Zamiatin’s or Orwell’s grimly prophetic voices of warning with their univocal, ideological messages, Moscow 2042 presents an exuberant, carnivalesque profusion of satire and humor which cuts both ways, serving simultaneously to satirize the failed utopia of Soviet society and to travesty the dystopian tradition of which it is itself a part. This introduces new difficulties not only for translators, but also for readers.10 Among major changes within the genre, critics noticed a general tendency toward a narrowing of thematic focus in recent dystopias, which often address specific audiences and target particular social issues: military policy, educational philosophy, women’s questions, etc. (Kumar 1987: 422). Voinovich’s dystopian world is also less generalized, less allegorical and much more content specific. It is aimed at particular events in the Soviet life of the Brezhnev era, satirizing definite characters from the Soviet and Russian emigré political and cultural scenes. This narrowing down of the referential meaning of the satire makes its reception by the target culture more difficult, since the reader has to be well-informed about various historical, political, and cultural details to appreciate the hidden allusions and implications of the narrative. In fact, according to Voinovich, this “recognizability” of certain characters and events had unfortunate implications for the writer and made it impossible for the novel to appear in Russian emigré newspapers and journals and in translation in France or Italy, as had been originally planned. In his recent work A Portrait on the Background of a Myth, Voinovich gives an interesting account of the political games and difficulties with translation and publication of Moscow 2042 which were triggered by the fact that one of his satirical characters was too reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn, who at the time, was a figure to be worshiped and idealized rather than criticized in the West (Voinovich 2002). The text of Moscow 2042 is saturated with humor based on word play and a variety of different tropes, which traditionally pose problems for translators. For example, in 10. It has been suggested that while Modernism aims at interpreting/reading, Postmodernism is against interpretation and deliberately implies “misreading” (Hassan, 1993: 152; Allen 2000: 188–208).

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his satirical portrayal of two different groups of Russian immigrants – one extremely nationalistic, full of false pretensions, and oriented towards the preservation of the socalled “genuine” cultural roots; the other with its primitive desire to assimilate as soon as possible and at any cost – Voinovich employs an interesting mixture of vocabulary belonging to different registers: archaisms, colloquialisms, and jargonisms. Depicting Solzhenitsyn in the grotesque character of Karnavalov, Voinovich mocks the writer’s Slavophile tendencies in his strict avoidance of any borrowings and the use of such absurd coinages as gliadelka instead of televizor for TV set (looker in the translation), letalka for samolet (plane), and chitalka for gazeta (newspaper).The translation does not give an adequate impression of Karnavalov’s refusal to use borrowed words, since such pairs as “reader/newspaper” or “looker/television” are of similar linguistic origin and represent a much less noticeable stylistic opposition. Everyday, Karnavalov spends several hours studying his favorite book, the famous nineteencentury Russian Language Dictionary by Vladimir Dal’. This affects his linguistic preferences and results in Karnavalov’s sticking to obsolete words, such as potrapeznichat’ (to eat), or stoichivo (steadfastly), and zaglotchiki (predators). It is obvious, that the English equivalents do not convey these stylistic nuances. The character of Karnavalov is a conglomerate of exaggerated, conflicting ideas and false pretensions. Russian patriarchal traditions are dutifully observed in Otradnoe, his house in Canada. The naming of his house after Count Rostov’s estate from Tolstoi’s War and Peace is yet another of Karnavalov’s claims to greatness. In the target text, it is translated as “Solace,” which results in the loss of another important intertextual allusion.11 In contrast with the future monarch, his secretary and brother-in-law Zilberovich uses macaronic speech, frequently introducing transliterated English words into his Russian: shestoi ekzit (exit 6), folui za etim shevrole (follow this Chevrolet), zaarentuesh kar (rent a car), dva maila (two miles). In addition, these English words are orthographically and grammatically disguised as Russian, which creates a ridiculous linguistic “salad” and intensifies the hypocritical image of Karnavalov’s universe. This device is lost in translation, since Zilberovich’s speech is presented in grammatically correct English. The stylistic possibilities of language traditionally stand in the foreground of many dystopian novels, both classical and more recent (Bolton 1984; Evans 1971; Evans 1987; Loseff 1984). In Orwell’s novel, lexicographers of Ingsoc, in their effort to mutilate history, replace the traditional language Oldspeak with Newspeak; in Anthony Burgess’s dystopia A Clockwork Orange, numerous neologisms borrowed from Russian are introduced to stress the moral and social debasement revealed, in part, in the degradation of the language. In this respect, the linguistic situation in Voinovich’s Moscowrep is similar to that of other dystopian worlds. The narrator, a native speaker 11. Linda Hutcheon describes this “double-codedness” as an essential element of postmodern texts (Hutcheon 1988: 49). See also: Allen 2000: 188–208.



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of Russian who, like Voinivich himself, has spent some time in immigration in Germany, is even offered an interpreter to help him understand this new Russian language with its strange new words, expressions, and notions. Numerous complex neologisms present a stylistic dissonance and a semantic absurdity which are only partially reproduced in the target text: “toilet” is called kabesot (kabinet estestvennykh otpravlenii) – “natfunctbur” (Bureau of Natural Functions) in the translation; INSOCHEL (institut sozdania novogo cheloveka) translated as “Instcrenewhum” (Institute for the Creation of a New Human Being), etc. In creating this “secondary” language of Moscowrep Voinovich ridicules Soviet linguistic reality with its permanent coinage of new words, “sovietisms”, and shows how the totalitarian state imposes its ideological dogmas through changes in the language.12 The oscillation between different linguistic registers extends throughout the narrative. The language of Moscowrep inhabitants is strictly regimented and presents a barbaric mixture of Soviet bureaucratic style, religious terminology, and new coinages. The narrator, on the other hand, shows an unconscious freedom from linguistic conventions in a society which has established a strict verbal order. After being searched by the Moscowrep secret police, he describes the incident with elements of thieves’ jargon (speret’ – “to lift”, sharit’ po karmanam – “to poach, to light-finger”), thus identifying the practice of KGB searches with pick-pocketing. The translation suggests standard English: “They had built communism, but they still went through your pockets” (Voinovich 1987: 135–6). The humorous effect of the narrative is intensified by the consistent violation of the reader’s expectations. For example, familiar set expressions and slogans of the Soviet era are often transformed in the text. Thus in the popular quotation from The Communist Manifesto “Proletarii vsekh stran, soediniaites’!” (Proletarians of all countries, unite!), the verb soediniates’ (unite) is replaced by the rhyming colloquial podtiraites’ (wipe). The translation suggests a less creative non-rhyming version: “Proletarians of all countries, wipe yourselves!” (Voinovich 1987: 136). The semantic and stylistic distortion of the famous quotation combined with the inappropriate context in which it is used – written on the wall of a public toilet – produce a humorous effect which aims at the text of reference and its mindless utilization by Soviet propaganda. These few examples show how the postmodern model of discourse, with its general shift in the literary and stylistic paradigm based on a variety of formal elements, is often violated in the target text. Elements of parody and travesty, as well as combinations of satire and humor, are often lost, in part because of the translator’s “over-domesticating” strategies, and in part because of the inability of the general readership to relate to the dual nature of specifically Russian cultural references and the hidden implications of the Russian absurd. As a result, even a genre well established in both 12. A detailed analysis of the influence of Soviet ideology on the contemporary state of the Russian language is presented in the lexicographic study by Mokienko and Nikitina (Mokienko et al. 1998).

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cultures, such as dystopia, has much more difficulty in reaching the hearts and minds of English-speaking readers in its postmodern than in its classical form.

Conclusion The comparison of the history of the translation of Zamiatin’s We and Voinovich’s Moscow 2042 and their transposition into a new cultural context helps us to understand how literary exchange occurs via translation. It serves as proof of the innovative influence of translation on a given literary tradition, and shows one of the numerous ways a literary canon is developed and kept alive. It also reminds us that translation, as a time- and culture-bound phenomenon, raises many questions, yet to be answered, about the dynamic relationship between the cultural profiles of literary texts and specific translation strategies. Obviously, the discussion cannot be limited to questions of translation practice alone, such as the accuracy of a translator’s style and the equivalency of registers. Instead, it should draw more on reception theory, clarifying what reading a translated text actually involves, and reflecting on the differences between the producing (source) and receiving (target) cultural contexts as the basic factor for a successful translation. This approach could contribute to a better understanding of the timeliness of a translated work, the differences between the readability of the original and the translation, and will help to avoid potential pitfalls encountered in the reception of translated texts.

Works cited Allen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality. London/New York: Routledge. Annenkov, Yurii. 1997. “Evgenii Zamiatin.” In V. E. Zamiatin. Uezdnoe. My, 474–509. Moscow: AST Olimp. Baker, Mona. 1998. “Norms.” In Routlege Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 163–165. London/New York: Routledge. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays,edited by Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Texas Univ. Press. Booker, M. Keith. 1994. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Bolton, Whitney French. 1984. The Language of “1984”: Orwell’s English and Ours. Knoxville: Tennessee Univ. Press. Bowering, Peter. 1969. Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Brodskii, Iosif. 1997. Posleslovie k povesti “Kotlovan,” In Andrei Platonov, Kotlovan, 550–551. Moscow: AST Olimp. Brown, Clarence. 1993. “Zamiatin and the Persian Rooster.” In Yevgeny Zamiatin “We,” xi–xxvi. New York: Penguin Books.



Russian dystopia in exile  Brown, Edward James. 1976. Brave New World, 1984 and We. An Essay on Anti-Utopia. Ann Arbor: Michigan Univ. Press. Evans, Robert O. 1971. “Nadsat: The Argot and Its Implications in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.” Journal of Modern Literature. 1.3: 406–410. –—. 1987. “The Noveau Roman, Russian Dystopias, and Anthony Burgess.” In British Novelists Since 1900, edited by J. I. Biles, 253–266. New York: AMS Press. Fenwick, Gillian. 1998. George Orwell. A Bibliography. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press. Ginsburg, Mirra (ed). 1970. Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin. Soviet Heretic. Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press. Ginsburg, Mirra. 1972. “Introduction.” In Yevgeny Zamiatin. We, v-xx. New York: Avon Books. Glenny, Michael. 1970. “Introduction.” In Yevgeny Zamiatin We, 9–22. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. Hashak, Paul G. 1994. Utopian / Dystopian Literature. A Bibliography of Literary Criticism. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. Hassan, Ihab. 1993. “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism: A Reader, edited by Thomas Docherty, 146–156. New York/London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Hermans, Theo. 1996. “Norms and the Determination of Translation.” In Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by R. Alvares and C. A. Vidal, 25–51. Clevedon/Philadelphia/Adelaide: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York/ London: Routledge. Kumar, Krishan. 1987. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford/New York: Blackwell. Loseff, Lev. 1984. On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature. Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner. Mokienko, Valentina and Tatiana Nikitina. 1998. Tolkovyi slovar’ iazyka sovdepii. St. Petersburg: Folio Press. Orwell, Sonia and Ian Angus (eds). 1970. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Raeff, Marc. 1990. A Cultural History of Russian Emigration 1919–1939. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Scherr, Barry. 2000. “Evgenii Zamiatin.” In Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English edited by Olive Classe, 1509–1511. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Slonim, Marc. 1959. “Preface.” In Evgeny Zamiatin. We, xxi-xxv. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1959 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. 1997. “Iz Evgeniia Zamiatina.” Novyi mir: 10: 99–105. Steinhoff, William. 1975. George Orwell and the Origins of “1984.” Ann Arbor: Michigan Univ. Press. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London/New York: Routledge. –—. 1998. The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethic of Difference. London/ New York: Routledge. Voinovich, Vladimir. 1987. Moscow 2042. Trans. Richard Lourie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. –—. 1996. Skazki dlia vzroslykh. Moscow: Vagrius. –—. 2002. Portret na fone mifa. Moscow: Eskmo. Zamiatin, Eugene. 1924. We. Trans. Gregory Zilboorg. New York: E. P. Dutton. –—. 1967. Litsa. Mezhdunarodnoe literaturnoe sodruzhestvo.

 Natalia Olshanskaya Zamiatin, Yevgeny. 1970. We. Trans. Bernard Guilbert Guerney. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. –—. 1972. We. Trans. by Mirra Ginsburg. New York; Avon Books. 1972. Zamyatin, Evgeny. 1987. “We.” In Russian Literature of the Twentieth Century. An Anthology, edited by Carl. R. Proffer et al. Trans. Samuel Cioran, 3–139. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Zamiatin, Evgenii. 1988. Sochineniia. Moscow: Kniga. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 1993. We / Trans. by Clarence Brown. New York: Penguin Books. Zamiatin, Evgenii. 1997. My. Moscow: AST Olimp. Zamyatin, Evgenii. 2006. We. Trans. Natasha Randall. New York: Random House. Zilboorg, Gregory. 1924. “Foreword.” In Eugene Zamiatin. We, xiii-xviii. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

Between cosmopolitanism and hermeticism Translating classical tragedy into Polish theater Allen J. Kuharski

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA The contemporary stage director Michał Zadara (b. 1976) has specialized in productions of neglected Polish and foreign classics, such as Jan Kochanowski’s seminal neo-classical tragedy Dismissing the Greek Envoys (1578) and Jean Racine’s Iphigènie (1674). Zadara’s cosmopolitan contemporary approach to such plays raises what he calls “the Polish question”: what is the Polish theater’s distinct identity and significant contribution in the larger cultural context of the European Union and globalization? In challenging the tacit presumption of the hermetic and untranslatable character of the canon of Polish verse drama outside of Poland, as well of the translatability of canonical Western texts into Polish, Zadara’s theatrical project reveals and emphasizes the cosmopolitanism and potential contemporary relevance of these texts in performance. Zadara’s theatrical resuscitation of Kochanowski and Racine involves issues of translation in a variety of registers: literary, performative, and political. These issues of translation deeply inform the cultural politics in play between Poland and the rest of Europe, as well as the Polish theater’s relationship to the genre of classical tragedy.

Introduction The Stary Teatr in Kraków in 2008 premiered a new Polish adaptation of Jean Racine’s baroque neo-classical tragedy Iphigènie (1674) by playwright Paweł Demirski (b. 1979) and director Michał Zadara (b. 1976). The production marked the completion of Zadara’s remarkable trilogy at the Stary Teatr of rarely-staged neo-classical plays that began in 2006 with Racine’s Phèdre (1677) and continued in 2007 with Dismissing the Greek Envoys (Odprawa posłów greckich; 1578), by the seminal Polish Renaissance poet

 Allen J. Kuharski

and playwright Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584).1 Zadara’s surprising theatrical resuscitation of both Kochanowski and Racine on the early twenty-first century stage stirs deep currents in contemporary Polish, European, and global culture, and involves issues of translation in a variety of registers: literary, performative, and political. The historical complexities and paradoxes of Poland’s relationship to European and world culture are uniquely illustrated by Kochanowski’s Dismissing the Greek Envoys, and are embodied in the contemporary success of Zadara’s production and his subsequent work with Demirski on a twenty-first-century Polish version of Racinian tragedy. These complexities and paradoxes have informed and defined the four centuries of Polish cultural history that separate Kochanowski from Demirski and Zadara. Both this history and Demirski and Zadara’s contemporary work raise profound questions about the practices and politics of translation, broadly defined. Zadara has spoken of the importance of what he calls “the Polish question” in contemporary Polish theater. For Zadara, the “Polish question” touches core concerns of the country’s cultural identity since its “ascension” into the European Union in 2004. On the one hand, after decades of Soviet domination, Polish theater artists such as Zadara have aspired to join the cultural economy of the rest of Europe, to share and contribute on an equal footing to the common theatrical culture. On the other, like every member of the E.U. (old or new, large or small), Poland is concerned with preserving what defines it culturally – that is, what makes its culture distinct and, therefore, un-reproducible. The project of economic integration represented by the E.U. has been possible to advance politically only thanks to the categorical avoidance of any parallel attempt at cultural integration among the member states. This is, however, a double-edged sword for countries on Europe’s cultural and economic periphery: while this protects Poland from the expectation of assimilating culturally or linguistically with its more powerful Western European partners, it also relieves those “partners” of any obligation to re-define their individual or collective understanding of cultural identity around new member states, such as the countries of Eastern Europe. As a result, the concept of a shared cultural identity or canon – or more meaningfully of an ongoing cultural dialog – among European countries remains essentially in a default mode that predates the end of the Cold War. Significant exceptions to this pattern can be found, however, in the work of individual artists, such as Zadara and Demirski, rather than in the rhetoric and practice of official culture. Within this larger European context, Zadara’s directorial work and playwriting insistently address the question of how to stage and understand anew the Polish repertory as part of a larger European theatrical culture, liberated from a history of foreign 1. Fedra. By Jean Baptiste Racine. Trans. Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński. Dir. Michał Zadara. Stary Teatr, Kraków. Premiere: 1 April 2006; Odprawa poslów greckich. By Jan Kochanowski. Dir. Michał Zadara. Stary Teatr, Kraków. Premiere: 13 January 2007; and Ifigenia. Nowa tragedia (według Racine’a). Text by Paweł Demirski and Michał Zadara (based on Jean Baptiste Racine). Stary Teatr, Kraków. Premiere: 27 June 2008.



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oppression, the defensive postures of nationalism, as well as the temptations of assimilation into a larger globalized cultural landscape. Understood in these terms, Zadara’s project is relevant outside of Poland, particularly among the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. It is also relevant outside the European context, insofar as Poland’s concerns for sustaining a distinct, dynamic, and visible contemporary culture within a rapidly globalizing world are shared by any number of countries, particularly those speaking languages other than English and associated historically with the so-called “second” and “third” worlds. With his trilogy, Zadara seeks to speak both as a Pole and as a European. By extension he seeks to place Poles in dialog on an equal footing with their fellow Europeans – as Europeans.2 His artistic agenda on this score is intrinsically social and political, and it is the social and political substance of this theater no less than its aesthetics that justifies its place in a larger European forum. In this respect, Zadara’s choice of plays by Kochanowski and Racine is crucial. The significance of Kochanowski or Racine to Zadara lies in the potential of their plays to support theatrical performance as a de facto democratic forum for current political concerns. The erudition of their neo-classical dramaturgy and the poetic eloquence of their language serve as the means to this larger end. In Zadara’s trilogy, the proposed contribution of a democratic Poland to Europe is an exemplary instance of the theater functioning as an intrinsically democratic institution, as a cultural expression of a functioning civil society. It is the prototype of a theater made by and for citizens collectively engaged in the politics of both a national and a global stage – citizens exercising their right to be heard (the domain of translation) and seen (the domain of theatrical performance). As was historically the case for Kochanowski and Racine as playwrights who created works commissioned by their respective monarchs for performance at court, Zadara’s twenty-firstcentury Polish theatrical “citizens” both talk among themselves and speak collectively to power. During the years of authoritarian communist rule, Polish theater in various ways rehearsed its role as the cultural forum of an emerging civil society by asserting its right to political dissent. The challenge and opportunity for the theater since 1989 has been to fully perform this role in the context of an independent and democratic Poland.

2. On this score, Zadara’s work can be seen as building on the arguments made by the émigré Polish playwright and novelist Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) in the 1950s in the first volume of his highly influential Diary. Writing in Argentina at the height of Stalinist rule in Poland, Gombrowicz argued for a new national self-definition for Poles and a critical re-examination of their mutual relationships with Europe and the world in the aftermath of World War II and the collapse of the Polish Second Republic.

 Allen J. Kuharski

The paradox of Kochanowski and classical tragedy in Polish theater Set in the court of King Priam in Troy on the eve of the attack on the city by the Greeks under Agamemnon’s command, Kochanowski’s play dramatizes the debate in the court surrounding the last chance to sue for peace in exchange for the return of Helen to the Greeks’ envoys (Ulysses and Helen’s spurned husband Menelaus). In spite of the best attempts of Priam’s advisor Antenor to persuade the court to accept the terms offered by the Greeks, issues of collective pride and honor sway the majority of Priam’s court to go to war. Cassandra delivers a tragic prophesy about the consequences of this choice, and the play ends with an ominous report from a captured Greek soldier. Described by the literary historian David Welsh as a Renaissance “rhetorical drama,”3 the play is both high stakes in content and seemingly static in terms of onstage action (Welsh 1974: 65). It also contains some of the most admired and influential poetry in the Polish language, specifically Cassandra’s prophesy of the fall of Troy and a final choral passage in which Kochanowski sought to reproduce in Polish the musical and metrical effect of the chorus in classical Greek tragedy (Euripides, in particular). Czeław Miłosz devoted more attention to Kochanowski’s text than to any other Polish play in his History of Polish Literature, and describes the Greek-inspired language of the chorus as “daring and beautiful” (Miłosz 1969: 70). In the words of the contemporary Polish poet and translator Stanisław Barańczak, Kochanowski “invented Polish poetry, and through his individual effort, brought it almost instantly to perfection” (Barańczak 1995: viii). The paradox of Kochanowski’s legacy in Poland is contained in the very cosmopolitanism and cultural hybridity that permitted him to create the first significant body of secular Renaissance poetry and the first neo-classical secular tragedy in the Polish language (or in any of the Slavic languages). Whether in the sixteenth century or today, the embrace of the principles of classical Greek theater and drama in Poland (a translation of the conventions of dramatic writing and theatrical performance) is potentially a movement towards cosmopolitanism in the country’s theatrical culture, a movement towards a shared European cultural legacy. In practice, beginning with Kochanowski, Poland’s most significant points of contact with Greek theater and drama have indeed consistently coincided with the most important new developments in Polish poetry, playwriting, performance theory, and theatrical practice. But these innovations have had an unexpected effect: they have also paradoxically made the Polish theater most distinct and separate from the rest of European theater – generating the very qualities that have in practice isolated the Polish drama, and generated a reputation abroad for parochialism or hermeticism, as well as extreme avant-gardism. 3. Welsh also argues that even with its limited modern production history, Kochanowski’s play is unique among similar European plays of its time in still being performed at all. On this score, Welsh refers to a revival of the play in Kraków in 1935 and version of the play broadcast on Polish television in the 1970s, but without any specific information on either production.



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Kochanowski’s play was originally commissioned and performed on the occasion of an aristocratic wedding between the poet’s patron, Jan Zamoyski, and Krystyna Radziwiłł at the court of the Hungarian-born Polish monarch Stefan Batory, at his palace in Warsaw. The combination of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s multiethnic population (only a plurality of which spoke Polish) and elected foreign monarchs such as Batory resulted in Latin being the lingua franca of the Polish court at this time – so Kochanowski’s unprecedented choice to write an original work in Polish in turn required translation for a significant part of its original audience. Along with Kochanowski’s other verse in Polish, Dismissing the Greek Envoys marked the emergence of an aristocratic, cosmopolitan, and secular literature written in vernacular Polish, an assertion of national cultural identity and Renaissance “modernity” alongside other European nations as much as among the diverse populations of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. Kochanowski’s literary production coincided with the height of Poland’s historic power and influence in Europe: by the late sixteenth century it was the largest state in Europe in territory, with a population that equaled that of Italy or the Iberian peninsula, and far surpassed that of England or France (Zamoyski 1998: 105). Beyond responding to a prestigious commission, the poet intended the play to be a political allegory for the Polish court’s internal divisions over how to respond to a building military crisis with Moscovy on the commonwealth’s eastern border (Welsh 1974: 75–77). Therefore, alongside its importance in literary and theatrical history, Dismissing the Greek Envoys also marks the birth of the political role of Polish theater as a de facto public forum for debate over national affairs. Dismissing the Greek Envoys, however, has not inspired a tradition of neo-classical playwriting in Poland. The most significant attempt to create a body of new Polish plays based explicitly on classical models is the cycle of four plays by the Neo-romantic Symbolist Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907), only one of which (The Return of Odysseus; Powrót Odysa, 1907) has enjoyed a significant place in the Polish theatrical repertory.4 In The History of Polish Literature, Miłosz describes these plays as “marginal to [Wyspiański’s] main work” (Miłosz 1969: 354). The assimilation of classical Greek drama in Poland after Kochanowski has been more in principle than in explicit imitation, in contrast to Racine’s work in France. The enduring metaphorical power of Kochanowski’s text, however, is reflected in the tradition in early twentieth-century Polish poetry (starting with Wyspiański) of referring to the Vistula River as the “Skamander,” symbolically equating Poland with Troy. “Skamander” provided the name for a key group of interwar Polish poets, as well as for the country’s most prestigious literary review at the time (Miłosz 1969: 358). Kochanowski’s Dismissing the Greek Envoys can be seen as inaugurating a Polish secular theater of metaphorical and efficacious political acts, of performance in the service of social or political ends. There are ultimately two such strains in Polish theater 4. The complete cycle consists of Meleager (1899), Protosilaos i Laodamia (1899), Achilleis (1903), and Powrót Odysa (1907).

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and drama. One is a product of nineteenth-century Romanticism and the loss of Poland’s independence following the partitions of the 1790s. This dynamic movement sought various political ends – the preservation of national identity, the cultivation of political engagement, and the restoration of the Polish state – and found inspiration in both religious ritual and Greek tragedy, as embodied in the mystical and ritualistic vision of early Greek theater as understood by the Romantic poet and playwright Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) in Poland, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and composer Richard Wagner in Germany, and the Symbolist playwright and director Wyspiański.5 This extensive tradition combines political consciousness with the invocation of the Slavic counterparts to the rhapsodists, the cult of Dionysos, and prototypical classical tragedy – the romantic myths of the dziad (a Slavic bard or griot), the wieszcz (a prophetic poet), and zaduszki (the pagan Balto-Slavic ritual of summoning the souls of the dead that preceded the Christian holiday of All Souls Day). Theatrically, this blending of ritual and political engagement in Polish theater in significant ways also anticipated the twentieth-century theories of Antonin Artaud in The Theatre and Its Double (1938). Based on the consistent hybridization of folk sources with successive waves of the avant-garde, this tradition has proved to be both vigorous and self-renewing. Significantly, among the most ardent admirers of Kochanowski’s verse in Dismissing the Greek Envoys were none other than Mickiewicz and Wyspiański. While the Polish Romantics ignored Kochanowski’s neo-classical form, they enthusiastically embraced the principle of the theater as a national forum devoted to high-stakes political subject matter, capable of both critically confronting state power and intervening in national affairs. Unlike Kochanowski at the humanist court of Stefan Batory, however, their efforts in this direction in post-partition Poland resulted in the banning of their work from the stage, in most cases until the twentieth century. The symbolic role of this line of Romantic Neo-classical work in Polish theater has been in eclipse since the end of communist rule in 1989, when new productions of the Romantic repertory have sunk to historic lows, comparable only to periods when these texts were banned by occupying foreign powers. The significance of this trend could be compared to a sudden twenty-year hiatus in significant productions of Shakespeare in Great Britain or of Goethe, Schiller, or Kleist in Germany. This was certainly not what most expected in a newly independent and democratic Poland, and contrasted sharply with the flowering of stage productions of the Romantic repertory following the establishment of the Polish Second Republic after World War I. A product of Poland’s history of foreign domination, its prestige enhanced by its embattled status during the decades of communist rule, the concept of an oppressed or messianic national identity 5. For Mickiewicz, the key text is his sixteenth lecture on Slavic literature given in Paris at the Collège de France on 4 April 1843 (available in an English translation by Daniel Gerould in TDR: The Drama Review, 30.3 (T111) (1986): 91–97). For Wagner and Nietzsche, the key text is The Birth of Tragedy (1872). For Wyspiański, his dramatic works embody his vision of Greek tragedy understood through the lens of Mickiewicz and Polish folklore and history.



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embodied in the Romantic and Neo-romantic repertory has become unmoored in the years since the end of communist rule and the country’s experience of democracy and voluntary entry into NATO and the European Union. In contrast, there has been a rise in the post-communist era of a more secular and rational version of the Polish dramatic tradition. In that context, Zadara’s theatrical reanimation of Kochanowski’s humanist tragedy finds its appropriate place among those parts of post-communist Polish theater under the influence of post-Brechtian German theater, of playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969), or of the Marxist Humanist critic Jan Kott (1914–2001), who re-imagined the significance of classical drama for the modern theater in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) or The Eating of the Gods (1970).

The cultural politics of translation In the case of Poland’s canon of Romantic and Neo-romantic plays, the working assumption both within Poland and beyond has been that of the untranslatability of texts by “national” poet/playwrights such as Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849), and later Wyspiański. According to this assumption, national cultural exceptionalism, and by implication hermeticism, is manifested in part by untranslatability. The theatrical extension of this presumed hermeticism would be unperformability, at least outside of Poland, and indeed key Polish Romantic classics such as Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve (Dziady, 1823–32), Słowacki’s Kordian (1834), or Wyspiański’s Deliverance (Wyzwolenie, 1901), which emphasize idiosyncratic Polish subjects and language, have generally not been translated or performed in English or most other languages. Ironically, Kochanowski’s Dismissing the Greek Envoys has shared the same fate abroad as the Polish Romantic canon: rarely translated into foreign languages and never performed abroad (and infrequently in Poland, as well).6 It would appear then that Kochanowski’s drama also matches the literary and theatrical definitions of a hermetic text – despite the fact that it is a play about the Trojan War without a single specific reference to anything Polish, and with verse echoing classical Greek models. Before Zadara’s 2007 Kraków production of Dismissing the Greek Envoys, perhaps the most significant literary challenge in English to Kochanowski’s dubious status as an “untranslatable” Polish poet 6. Kochanowski’s play was published in a scholarly English translation in iambic pentamenter by the American polonist George R. Noyes in 1928, with the title Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys, in the collection Poems of Jan Kochanowski (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1928). In 1994, Charles S. Kruszewski published a proposed acting version also in iambic pentameter, with rhymed couplets for the first two choral odes (Studio City, CA: Players Press, Inc., 1994), using the same title as the earlier version by Noyes. Both the Noyes and the Kruszewski are out of print and difficult to obtain. More recently, Prof. Bill Johnston at Indiana University in 2004 produced a still unpublished translation of the play entitled The Envoys, again largely in iambic pentameter, with some passages in rhymed couplets and other meters.

 Allen J. Kuharski

came with the publication of his cycle of poems Laments (Treny, 1580) in a translation by Stanisław Barańczak and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in 1995. This paradoxical dance of cosmopolitanism and hermeticism moves in a straight historical line in Polish theater and drama from Kochanowski to Zadara, through intermediary figures such as Mickiewicz, Słowacki, and Wyspiański. The biographies of all these figures share certain characteristics: all were highly educated and fully fluent in several languages; all were widely traveled and lived for years abroad; and all were highly conversant with the defining contemporary European cultural movements of their times. In the cases of Kochanowski and Mickiewicz, they both received exceptionally thorough educations in classical languages and literatures, which directly informed their work on a Polish version of classical Greek theater and drama. Mickiewicz made his living abroad at times as a professor of classical languages, and was able to read not only Greek and Latin, but also Hebrew, and was fully fluent in Russian and French. Mickiewicz’s extreme erudition as a poet and playwright can only be matched in the history of European drama by that of Racine, whose rigorous Jansenist religious education included a thorough knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. Słowacki and later Wyspiański were also polyglots with strong artistic and personal ties to Western Europe, and with France in particular. Kochanowski spent extended periods in Prussia and France and was able to read both classical Greek and Latin as a result of his years of elite education in Poland and Italy. Translation of classical and Renaissance literature into Polish was a specialty of the Kochanowski family: Jan’s younger brothers Mikołaj and Andrzej produced major translations of Plutarch and Virgil, and his nephew Piotr produced a translation of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, which is considered a classic of Polish Baroque verse (Welsh 1974: 14, 28; Miłosz 1969: 61). Had Jan Kochanowski limited himself to such translation projects, he certainly would have played a similar role as an agent for the ongoing “Europeanization” of Polish literary culture at the time. By devoting himself instead to laying the foundations of an original Polish vernacular poetry and drama that was also largely in step with the larger practices in late Renaissance poetry in Europe at the time, he became an isolated figure. Historically, the road between Europe and Poland in such cases has run in only one direction: from West to East.

From Kochanowski to Zadara Michał Zadara’s contemporary biography curiously recalls that of Kochanowski. Zadara’s formation before returning to Poland to live in 2000 was both Western European and American. He was educated in American schools in Frankfurt-amMain and Vienna while his parents worked abroad in the 1980s and 1990s. Zadara grew up fluent in Polish, French, German, and English. While Polish was his first language, before returning to Poland in 2000 his formal education had been primarily American in content, and quite elite in character. His informal cultural education



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before university was German and Austrian. Polish was the language of his family life and of summer holidays spent in Poland. When he began his university studies in the United States, he was a highly-educated and well-traveled young Pole who was completely ignorant of the Polish theatrical and literary canon. Perhaps more precisely, he was a child of the European Union of the mid-1990s, although one with a Polish passport, suggesting how the cultural asymmetry between Western and Eastern Europe endured well into the post-Soviet era. His first contact with Polish high culture, in particular Polish theater and drama, took place in his university studies of theater in the United States. His first directing work in Poland was of an American play in Polish translation (Eric Bogosian’s Drinking In America, 1986), and in the United States his first full production was of a Polish play in English (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s The Water Hen; Kurka wodna, 1921). In collaboration with an American assistant, Zadara completed a new English translation of Kochanowski’s Dismissing the Greek Envoys in 2006 for use in the supertitles that would accompany the performance of his production on tours to festivals in Poland with international audiences.7 Zadara’s artistic reputation has been earned in part by his embrace of neglected Polish drama. In addition to Kochanowski, he has taken up works as diverse as Mikołaj Rej’s Renaissance morality play The Merchant (Kupiec, 1549; staged at the Stary Teatr in 2009) and the Romantic poet/playwright Juliusz Słowacki’s Father Marek (Ksiądz Marek, 1843; staged at the Stary Teatr in 2005).8 Like Kochanowski, Rej is a canonical figure in Polish literary history, but neither of their plays has had any notable tradition of theatrical performance before now. While Słowacki’s Father Marek was frequently performed in Poland between its world premiere in 1901 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the first of a scattering of postwar productions in communist Poland did not take place until 1963 (directed by Adam Hanuszkiewicz), and these ended with a Warsaw production in 1983 (directed by Krzysztof Zaleski).9 In subject matter and language, Słowacki’s historical epic epitomizes both the appeal and the challenge of the Polish Romantic repertory today. The play features a sprawling and violent historical canvas, a bitter political sensibility, a concern with mystical and religious themes, and operatic characters that speak in a verse of startling energy and modernity. Słowacki’s text has never been translated or performed in any foreign language. As later with Dismissal of the Greek Envoys, Zadara’s revisionist 2005 production of Father Marek reopened the theatrical conversation about a dormant national classic, in this instance by emphasizing the contemporary metaphorical dimension of its historical subject: 7. Zadara collaborated on the translation in 2006 with the Polish-American student Joseph Borkowski. 8. Kupiec Mikołaja Reja, by Mikołaj Rej. Dir. Michał Zadara. Stary Teatr, Kraków. Premiere: 8 May 2009; Ksiądz Marek, by Juliusz Słowacki Dir. Michał Zadara. Stary Teatr, Kraków. Premiere: 10 November 2005. 9. Marta Piwińska, Wstęp, Ksiądz Marek, by Juliusz Słowacki, ed. Marta Piwińska (Wrocław: Biblioteka Narodowa, 1991): CXVIII-CXXVII.

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inter-ethnic violence in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands in the seventeenth century (its conceit alluding to similar patterns of violence in the same region in World War II or in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s). Since the start of his professional directing career in 2003, Zadara has created an unprecedented body of work that encompasses the full breadth of the Polish theatrical canon, from Rej and Kochanowski to first productions of contemporary plays. “The Polish question” hovers over this work, motivating both his choice and his interpretation of the plays he has directed. At times, a Polish dimension is added where least expected (as in his translation and stage adaptation of the classic Hollywood screenplay for Some Like It Hot or his adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s novel The Paul Street Boys).10 Zadara nevertheless consistently and rigorously rejects any notion of Polish cultural exceptionalism or hermeticism. He approaches a work by Kochanowski, Słowacki, or Wyspiański as he would a play by Racine, Kleist, or Yeats, and sees these plays first as specific dramaturgical constructs in ways not limited to the Polish context or tradition. Most importantly, Zadara searches for the most appropriate ways to make these plays relevant to a contemporary audience, Polish or otherwise. Zadara is a theatrical cosmopolitan, a disciple of contemporary Austrian and German theater no less than the product of his American education or his directorial training in Poland. His directorial lens is a self-consciously German one: postBrechtian and post-dramatic, with the Volksbühne director Frank Castorf as his patron saint. Zadara’s attraction to German designers such as Magdalena Musiał and Thomas Harzem as collaborators is also a concrete expression of this. Yet this all remains the means to the end of reanimating Polish works suffering no less from overfamiliarity (Wyspiański’s The Wedding; Wesele, 1901; Tadeusz Różewicz’s The Card

10. Na gorąco [Some Like It Hot], adapted and translated from the film by Billy Wilder by Michał Zadara. Dir. Michał Zadara. Teatr Współczesny, Szczecin. Premiere: 7 October 2006; and Cłopcy z Placu Broni, by Ferenc Molnár. Adapt. Michał Zadara. Dir, Michał Zadara. Teatr Mały/Teatr Narodowy, Warsaw. Premiere: 9 June 2007. In his Polish translation and stage adaptation of the classic Billy Wilder film, Zadara set the action among various Polish ex-patriots arriving in contemporary Chicago looking for work. In his adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s classic novel for young people, the title of which is usually translated as The Paul Street Boys, Zadara added specifically Polish historical and political references to the games of “war” played by the schoolboys in the novel. A quirk of the standard Polish translation of the text (long required and popular reading in Polish elementary schools) is its translation of the title as roughly The Boys from Armory Square, which adds a military allusion not found in the original Hungarian. Cast with adult male actors playing the story’s pre-adolescent schoolboys, the Brechtian theatrical effect was of adult men playing boys playing at being adult men in military conflict over issues of national honor. The only young actor in the cast played the key role of Nemeczek, who becomes the unwitting victim of the boys’ war games.



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Index; Kartoteka, 1961)11 than from theatrical neglect (Dismissing the Greek Envoys; Father Marek). The theater of Michał Zadara marks the third stage in a new self-definition in Polish theater that began in the 1980s, anticipating in the last years of communist rule the cultural issues that would arise following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The foundation of this movement is the ongoing work of the director Krystian Lupa (b. 1943), who moved away from both Polish drama and the historic innovations of earlier Polish directorial auteurs, such as Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999). Lupa nevertheless demonstrated the significance of a contemporary Polish theatrical lens in his treatment of Austrian writers (Musil, Bloch, Bernhard), as well as of other modern European classics such as Nietzsche or Bulgakov. The subsequent work of the Polish directors Grzegorz Jarzyna (b. 1968) and Krzysztof Warlikowski (b. 1962) also began to look to the West, but in a different way, by moving away from Polish playwrights while developing a contemporary theatrical style that was akin to new work in Paris, Berlin, or Vienna. Zadara has spoken of the emergence of a new cultural zone characterized by the increasing hybridization of Polish and German/Austrian influences. The ongoing work of Lupa or Warlikowski can be seen as part of this process. If there is a common denominator in the work of Lupa, Warlikowski, and Zadara, it is their shared interest in philosophy. Zadara’s “Polish question” is ultimately ontological or phenomenological in nature, not a revival of Mickiewicz’s messianic Romantic nationalism. Zadara’s contribution to this line of work has been to bring a European directorial lens to the most intimately Polish material. With his interest in Racine, however, he has staked out entirely new territory for contemporary Polish theater.

Zadara’s tragic trilogy Zadara’s Kraków trilogy began in 2006, raising questions of how and why to stage a neo-classical drama such as Racine’s Phèdre in the twenty-first century. While there is a modest history of performing Racine in Poland (primarily Phèdre), there is no record of a previous production of Iphigènie. On this score, a Polish theatrical production of Racine’s text is no less a rarity than one of Rej or Kochanowski, and similarly comes with no coherent theatrical provenance (while Iphigènie was Racine’s most popular play in his own time, it is rarely performed today in France). In this context, it is Racine that carries the burden of apparent unperformability. The neo-classicism of Kochanowski and Racine that has inspired Zadara and Demirski, like the ancient Greek playwrights that in turn influenced Kochanowski and Racine, is characterized by a new and distilled expressivity of language (but which was 11. Wesele. By Stanisąaw Wyspiański. Dir. Michał Zadara. Teatr Stu, Kraków. Premiere: 3 February 2006; and Kartoteka. By Tadeusz Tadeusz Różewicz. Dir. Michał Zadara. Teatr Współczesny, Wrocław. Premiere: 8 December 2006.

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also unmistakably the language of its own time); a confrontation with ultimate ethical questions; and a metaphorical portrayal of contemporary socio-political realities (the idea of the theater as a political forum, as an active engagement with the citizens of a given polis). When Kochanowski or Racine departed from the Greek tragedians, it was to honor them in principle rather than in the imitation of specific detail. Each sought to be a poet testing and defining the language of his own time and culture; to work through the ethical, philosophical, and metaphysical givens of a culture that was now living in the wake of the Classical world, Christianity, and the Renaissance (and for Kochanowski and Racine the Counter Reformation, as well); and in the end to reflect and shape a political order without exact precedent in the ancient world. Zadara and Demirski – and their contemporary Polish audience – are living in the wake of the retreat of Soviet communism, Poland’s entry into NATO and the European Union, and the advance of globalization. Surprisingly and provocatively, given his identification with the Polish classical repertory, Zadara has singled out Racine as his favorite playwright. Both Zadara’s cosmopolitanism and his strongly rational and philosophical bent are reflected in his unlikely taste for Racine: he first encountered the playwright in English translation during his university studies in the United States, along with Roland Barthes’s classic study On Racine. A long excerpt from Barthes’s study was reprinted in the program for Zadara’s 2006 production of Phèdre. The germ of Zadara’s evolving political and philosophical vision of tragedy in twenty-first-century theater is contained in an interview in the press materials for his Iphigènie: [Racine] is the most rational of writers that one can imagine, and at the same time writes of great passions. This intersection of great passions and an exceptional precision of thought is very close to me.12

In their program essay for Iphigènie, Zadara and Demirski argue specifically for the validity of classical tragedy in contemporary theater and for its continuing relevance. In so doing, they swim against the dominant current of “postdramatic” theory and directing practice in the work Zadara otherwise most admires in Germany today: The dominant critical discourse in theater for a long time has held that there is not a place in the contemporary world for ancient tragedy. Tragedy in its ancient sense would not occur in a fluid, post-political reality. In the course of the work on our Iphigènie, on the one hand we came to understand that this was not true. And on the other, the fact became ever more apparent that such theatrical critical discourse is itself an integral element of the dominant political discourse and in this sense it is not possible to speak in any way of the apolitical nature of theater. In order to believe in the possibility of tragedy and to see its painful concrete 12. Michał Zadara and Paweł Demirski, interview with Agnieszka Fryz-Więcek, “Bogowie są okrutni mimo tego, że ich nie ma,” interview included with press materials for Ifigenia. Nowa tragedia (według Racine’a), trans. Allen Kuharski, Stary Teatr, Kraków, 27 June 2008.



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form, we must shift the position from which we observe the world. On the peripheries, in the alleys, in the dumpsters of the dominant vision of the world, which is sustained (as sarcastically confirmed by some contemporary cultural critics) by something like five hundred rich white men – it is precisely there on the peripheries, in the armies, in the refugee camps, among those people that have become the victims of political processes, it is precisely there that tragedy occurs in the ancient sense.13

While Zadara’s productions allude specifically to ongoing wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, his call to “shift the position from which we observe the world” implies also the particular relevance of Polish theater as the expression of a culture with a significant history and a living memory of political peripheralization and victimization. The discoveries of Zadara’s Phèdre were in its evocation of both a technocratic contemporary European government focused on image management (Magdalena Musiał’s set consisted entirely of reflective mylar) and vivid figures drawn from popular cinema for the portrayal of the young lovers Hippolyte and Aricie (in particular Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The play’s intrinsic eroticism was heightened by the highly physical performances of the young lovers (Błażej Peszek and Barbara Wysocka), and this, combined with the play’s visual world, provided a vivid immediacy rather than any specific political dimension. The artistic questions that remained for Zadara in the wake of the production were specifically how to define a classical metaphor for current political events as well as how to find an appropriate voice and language in Polish for this approach in the contemporary theater – specifically, how to rise to the challenge of performing Racine in translation in a new century? Unfortunately, there was no better acting version available than the Boy-Żeleński translation that dated from 1920, which Zadara found ultimately unsatisfactory.14 While the question of translating the play’s theatrical embodiment had been answered, those of its language and political relevance were still open. Zadara immediately applied the theatrical idiom he developed in Phèdre to Kochanowski’s sixteenth-century neo-classical play, with its archaic yet seminal Renaissance Polish verse. Again the play’s world was recognizably that of a beleaguered contemporary government run by technocrats, and contemporary popular culture again provided a vivid counterpoint in the production’s use of music and in Barbara Wysocka’s performance of the Chorus and Cassandra as a kind of mocking hip-hop poet backed up by composer Dominik Strycharski’s improvised dissonant techno score. In this case, the production’s political referents were unmistakably the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which Poland was a prominent ally of the United States, second 13. Paweł Demirski and Michał Zadara, “Przedmowa do sztuki,” program essay for Ifigenia. Nowa tragedia (według Racine’a), trans. Allen Kuharski, Stary Teatr, Kraków, 27 June 2008. 14. Zadara apparently dismissed the possibility of using the only other published Polish translation of the text, by Artur Międzyrzecki (published in Waraw in 1978 by Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy).

 Allen J. Kuharski

only to Great Britain in its military commitment in Iraq. The production ended with a tour de force scene of the Greek messenger appearing naked and bloodied on the set’s pristine white floor, a resonant image given that Poland’s first military fatalities since World War II had taken place in Iraq. Zadara’s production of Dismissing the Greek Envoys was originally intended for a limited run of performances, with a modest budget and an unusually short rehearsal period for Poland’s leading classical repertory company (one of the country’s two officially designated national theaters, with artistic resources appropriate to that status).15 The production proved an unexpected critical and popular success, and firmly established Zadara’s reputation as a distinct and significant voice among emerging directors in contemporary Polish theater. Zadara’s production is arguably the most significant since its first performance in 1578 – which might be considered faint praise given the sparseness of the play’s stage history overall, but not given the exceptional cultural significance and literary qualities of the text (which Zadara staged without a single cut). The production toured extensively to festivals around Poland and remained in the Stary’s active repertory for several years afterward. The success of the production earned Zadara the artistic freedom to propose the unusual choice of Iphigènie as the culmination of his evolving trilogy project. The successful discovery of an unprecedented theatrical form for Kochanowski returned him to the question of performing Racine in translation. Zadara discovered in Kochanowski’s Dismissing the Greek Envoys the quality and power of stage language he was still seeking for Racine in contemporary Polish. The plot of Racine’s Iphigènie follows the story in Homer and other sources of Agamemnon’s final dilemma on the eve of the Trojan War. In Racine, the local priest Calchas informs the Greek commander that the gods will not permit the winds for his fleet to set sail until he sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia, who is engaged to be married to Achilles. Calchas’s demand of the sacrifice of Iphigenia creates a potential crisis in Agamemnon’s marriage to Clytemnestra, as well as with the commanders of the Greek armies he has assembled. At the last moment, Calchas unexpectedly changes his call from the sacrifice of Iphigenia to that of her companion, the dispossessed Eriphile, the illegitimate daughter of Helen and Theseus. Eriphile (who we learn was earlier raped by Achilles) goes to the altar to be sacrificed, Iphigenia’s engagement to

15. The other such institution is Teatr Narodowy (National Theatre) in the historic Teatr Wielki in Warsaw, which was not operational for extended periods after World War II, first due to the destruction of the facility during the German occupation and later as the result of a fire in the 1980s that gutted the building. Beyond its greater institutional continuity, the Stary Teatr in repertory, artistic prestige, and scale of operations has historically functioned de facto as a national theater. It was officially designated as such during a reorganization of state-supported theaters in the 1990s. As reflected in the types of productions that Zadara has directed there, the Stary Teatr’s commitment to the staging of the Polish classical repertory in recent years has consistently surpassed that of the Teatr Narodowy in Warsaw.



Between cosmopolitanism and hermeticism 

Achilles is confirmed, and the needed wind rises so that Agamemnon’s forces can set sail to Troy. The resulting performance text for Demirski and Zadara’s version of Iphigènie stood distinctly apart from the spoken poetry of either Phèdre or Dismissing the Greek Envoys. This is announced in the play’s title Iphigenia, A New Tragedy (After Racine’s Version) (Ifigenia. Nowa tragedia [według wersji Racine’a]), along with their sharing credit with Racine for the Polish text. The structure and action of the text closely follows that of Racine’s original, with only one significant adaptation in the plot: the problem confronting Agamemnon’s contemporary military forces here is unexpected hurricane-force winds rather than the lack of wind to set sail. The suggestion here is that climate change is now shaping the fate of the characters in unexpected ways. For the playwright and director, the debates between Agamemnon and his Greek allies and their negotiations with Calchas echoed the preparations surrounding the so-called military “surge” in Iraq at the time by the United States and its allies, such as Poland. The new Polish text otherwise scrupulously follows Racine’s original, speech by speech, but is in a spare, even stark, contemporary prose, with no attempt at meter or rhyme. In the production’s most startling choice, every line of the Polish text was projected as spoken on both video monitors placed around the actors in view of the audience and onto a vertical white wall in front of or above which much of the action took place. Zadara’s initial impulse to project the text was inspired in part by Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt (Le Mépris), in which characters speaking four different languages converse through various translators about a film project in production, with any given audience relying on subtitles in its own language throughout. Godard’s contemporary retelling of the Homeric legend of Odysseus, Penelope, and Poseidon (both the story of the film-within-the film and of the parallel narrative in the lives of the characters making the film) and the stark Mediterranean setting inform the dramaturgical and visual conception of Zadara’s production (for which he was also the set and lighting designer). The effect also emphasizes the intentionally telegraphic quality of Demirski and Zadara’s adaptation and translation of Racine’s text. The reading of the text by the audience (and at times by the actors) is therefore as important as hearing it spoken by the actors (the sound of the wind at times also drowns out the actors’ voices, with only the supertitles comprehensible). Moreover, the projected text often appears on top of the actors’ bodies as they speak, evoking the commingling of image, speech, and text in television news coverage of events such as the war in Iraq. The most profound expressive effect of the projected Polish text, however, is that of each line as prescribed for the character speaking it, of speech (and Racine’s original text) as fate. Zadara’s conception for the actors’ performance was that they actually read their lines off the screens as if off a teleprompter, without having memorized them. The unique effect is that of a theatrical and political passive voice, made all the more chilling by the deliberate Orwellian flatness of the language. This is the public language of officialdom and of the media that provides a version of its actions and world events, not of the passionate poetic expression of exceptional individuals. Racine’s “great passions” in this

 Allen J. Kuharski

version are trapped within and between characters such as Iphigenia, Eriphile, or Clytemnestra and their speech. This tension captures in a new way the profound interiority of Racine’s original characters, which in turn lends them a modern psychological quality. This psychological quality is joined with a sense of secular political modernity in Racine’s choice never to have the gods appear on stage. Thus Calchas is at best an ambiguous player, possibly the messenger of the gods or just a political manipulator with his own agenda. In Zadara and Demirski’s words: The mechanism of tragedy becomes possible to understand only when we compare it to contemporary reality. In the contemporary world, the place of the gods is occupied by the dominating languages of power and political systems which – in spite of the reassurances of the priests of neo-liberalism about the softness of their political means – each day decide humanity’s fate and destiny. [...] In this sense the mechanism of tragedy becomes a means that moves towards universality. But not the universality according to which each human being in each period of history encounters something close to an indefinable tragic fate. But rather a universality that says that human beings suffer as a result of a very concrete and dominant model of power. In this sense as well the writing of new versions of ancient tragedies becomes a means of critiquing the present political consensus and the languages of power that support it.16

The casting between the three productions in Zadara’s trilogy viscerally embodies the tragic confrontation between this “model of power” and those confronting it. On the one hand, the distinguished Polish actor Jan Peszek plays Theseus in Phèdre, Ulysses in Dismissing the Greek Envoys, and Agamemnon in Iphigènie. On the other, the repeated presence of actor Barbara Wysocka makes her into the dramaturgical icon of the trilogy, moving from Racine’s Aricie to Kochanowski’s Chorus and Cassandra, only to end with the morally ambiguous title character in Zadara and Demirski’s Iphigènie. By Zadara’s own admission, the final production’s resonance with current events in Iraq was diffused by the time of its opening in June 2008. So the broader questions of the universality of its material and the production’s expressive theatrical form (particularly its unprecedented language) were heightened. Zadara and Demirski’s stated goal of “critiquing the present political consensus and the languages of power that support it” through new versions of ancient tragedies could have served as the epigraph for the original performance of Dismissing the Greek Envoys in Warsaw in 1578. The irony here is that the universality that Zadara has defined is present in Kochanowski no less than in Racine, and in fact preceded Racine in European drama by a century. That Kochanowski’s play has taken 400 years again to find a theatrical embodiment able to critique and to out-maneuver the “models of power” it has confronted is perhaps more a reflection of the degree of repressive political forces 16. Demirski and Zadara, “Przedmowa do sztuki,” program essay for Ifigenia.



Between cosmopolitanism and hermeticism 

at play in Poland over the centuries than of any characteristics of the play per se. On one level, Zadara’s various contemporary political interventions in his trilogy readily date the work. On another level, by challenging and leveling the theatrical playing field between Poland and its new cultural trading partners in Europe, the trilogy remains a significant cultural gambit. Zadara’s reanimation of neo-classical tragedy simultaneously through Kochanowski and Racine moves contemporary Polish and European theater into unchartered waters. In embracing and asserting a Polish voice (both historical and contemporary) in the polyglot context of the contemporary European Union, as well as standing apart from English as the new lingua franca of the E.U. and of globalization, Zadara’s broad project of theatrical translation creates a two-way road (or in regard to English, a bypass). Zadara’s cosmopolitan contemporary directorial lens provides an alternative theatrical lingua franca for the ultimate translation and transmission of the Polish texts he stages to foreign audiences. While his productions are enhanced by an outstanding literary translation of their texts for supertitles and even publication, they are not dependent upon them to reach their international audience.17 In practice, such productions performed successfully abroad transmit the text to nonPolish audiences and can provide the hitherto missing goad for the commission of serious new translations in the neglected field of Polish verse drama (for example, commissioning a major poet such as Seamus Heaney to continue the work he began with Kochanowski’s Laments with Dismissing the Greek Envoys). These are steps towards the most elusive theatrical manifestation of all: the successful production of a play such as Dimissing the Greek Envoys or Father Marek in a foreign language (the privilege of Western European verse classics such as Shakespeare, Racine, or Goethe). The presumptions of untranslatability or unperformability easily lend themselves to a politics of silence and invisibility: a cultural delegation to the periphery and dispossession. At the same time, the “model of power” that Zadara seeks to expose and critique desires to belie its true nature – such power employs a strategy of silence and invisibility. The Greek root of the word “theater” (teatron) means “seeing place.” In their total theatrical translation of Racine’s Iphigènie, Demirski and Zadara have literally made the role of language on every level visible. ***

Postscript After the premiere of Iphigenia: A New Tragedy (After Racine) in Kraków in June, 2008, Michał Zadara’s next production was another collaboration with Paweł Demirski on 17. In the case of a performance of Zadara and Demirski’s Ifigenia. Nowa tragedia (według Racine’a) for a French audience, the supertitles would of course be of Racine’s original text.

 Allen J. Kuharski

an original play entitled Tykocin. Commissioned as part of a year of official Polish-Israeli cultural exchanges, the play is a treatment of contemporary Polish-Jewish relations and each group’s respective relationship to the history of the Holocaust. It was written by Demirski and Zadara in Polish, and first performed in Hebrew by actors from the Habbima National Theater of Israel at Teatr WspóPczesny in Wrocław, Poland, in November, 2008. Thus the world premiere of a new Polish play took place in Hebrew in front of a Polish audience with supertitles in English and Polish. A parallel production created by an Israeli director with Polish actors from Wrocław entitled Bat Yam was performed together with Tykocin in Poland with supertitles in English, and subsequently in Tel’Aviv with supertitles in Hebrew. It is difficult to say whether these polyglot theatrical events more resembled the first performance of Dismissing the Greek Envoys at the court of Stefan Batory in Warsaw in 1578 or a scene from a lost film by Godard. But the logic of the evolution of Zadara and Demirski’s theatrical work was undeniably clear. The success of Zadara’s Kraków trilogy also led to his invitation to direct the Polish premiere of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’s rarely-performed 1966 experimental choral work Oresteia (based on the one complete surviving Greek tragic trilogy) at Warsaw’s National Opera in 2010. Zadara’s concept for the production was as a revisionist historical metaphor for Poland’s political transition from resistance to the combined Nazi and Soviet occupations in World War II through various post-war communist regimes. As intended by the composer, Zadara’s production was sung in ancient Greek using Aeschylus’s original text as its libretto. The Warsaw production was performed with Polish supertitles.

Works cited Barańczak, Stanisław. 1995. Introduction. In Laments, by Jan Kochanowski, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Godard, Jean-Luc (dir). 1963. Le Mépris [Contempt], perf. Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance. Les Films Concordia/Rome Paris Films/Compagnia Cinematografica Champion. Kochanowski, Jan. 1995. Laments, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Miłosz, Czesław. 1969. The History of Polish Literature. London: Collier-Macmillan. Racine, Jean. 1920. Fedra, trans. Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński. Kraków: Gebethner i S-ka. Welsh, David. 1974. Jan Kochanowski. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. Zamoyski, Adam. 1998. The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture. New York: Hippocrene Books.

The other polysystem The impact of translation on language norms and conventions in Latvia Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia

This article examines how shifts in the socio-political context in Latvia have affected the norms and conventions of both translation language and original language. After 50 years of assymetric bilingualism (with the increasing dominance of Russian), Latvian language policy was changed radically by the Language Law of 1989, passed two years before Latvia regained independence. Language protections were further strengthened after independence and enshrined (with certain sociolinguistic concessions) in the State Language Law of 1999. Latvian is today the sole official language of the country and the laws and regulations have increasingly focused on encouraging the use of Latvian as a language of administration, media, merchandise instructions, etc. Accession to the EU made Latvian an official language of the Union as well. Already in the 1990s, English replaced Russian as the major contact language and today about two thirds of Latvian texts are translations from English, followed by Russian, German, and Scandinavian languages. As approximately 70% percent of the texts consumed by the average Latvian are translations, translation language has inevitably affected Latvian itself. A shift in norms and conventions – mostly aligning Latvian with English – can be observed. While this represents the third shift within the last two centuries, former influences remain evident in the language as well.

Historical background Latvian is one of the “lesser used languages” of Europe (about 1.4. million native speakers, fewer than 1 million dsecondary speakers). After 20 years of independence in the interwar period, Latvian was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, Nazi Germany in 1941, and the USSR again in 1944/5. It declared independence in 1990 and regained it de facto in 1991. In 2004 Latvia joined the European Union and considers itself to be “back in Europe.” However, the country returned to “Europe” in a very different social,

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

demographic and cultural condition than when it left as a result of the Soviet occupation in 1940. The twentieth century brought about considerable ethnic changes in Latvia (as well as in the other Baltic states). 1939 saw the repatriation of the German minority. The Soviets purged Latvia’s intellectuals and elite circles in 1940/1. The Nazis extinguished the Jewish minority. From 1941 to 1949 about 110,000 Latvians were deported to Siberia and the Far North. In 1944 about 120,000 Latvians went into exile in the west. Deportations and killings continued until the early 1950s. As a result of these calamities, Latvia lost about a third of its population. During the Soviet years a large number of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians, mainly party officials, military personnel, exmilitary personnel, KGB operatives, police officials and their families came to live in Latvia. Thus Latvia experienced a radical change in its ethnic composition as well as in the use of the Latvian language, which was gradually ousted from administrative and other domains. Russian became the exclusive language in transportation, industry, the military and other walks of life. Russian-speaking immigrants were not encouraged to learn Latvian while the use of Russian became, for all practical purposes, mandatory for Latvians. Other traditional minorities had no linguistic rights, no schools, or publishing venues and were subject to forced assimilation. Diversity was turned into uniformity of the Soviet variety. There was a real danger of Latvians becoming a minority in their own land. Officially bilingualism was considered the norm, but in fact it was an asymmetrical societal bilingualism. In fact modern research often characterizes the Russo-Soviet agenda as colonial in character, deliberately eroding the Baltic languages as “an act of psychic annihilation” (Jirgens 2006: 55). The tensions between the communities were not allowed to surface – any open defence of Latvian was characterized as “bourgeois nationalism” and prosecuted. However, cultural life in the post-Stalinist era did not decline. Though straightjacketed by Soviet norms, theater attendance, choral singing and book publishing (traditional cultural expressions of Latvians) prospered, partly because the Soviet Union vaunted its cultural policies, partly because Latvians managed to use the official dogmas for their own agenda, and partly because theater and reading were practically the only spheres where the Latvian language could be used. Book editions reached unbelievable proportions. Both original Latvian and translated works typically exceeded circulations of 50,000, with bestsellers surpassing 100,000. And that was for a Latvian reading public of approximately 1.4 million. Technical and reference literature was translated almost exclusively from Russian, fiction – mostly from the original languages. Translations, however, were not very numerous and rather selective, as Communist ideology and censorship generally preferred classics and “progressive” Western literature. The language issue has always been at the core of Latvian national identity. Thus Latvian regained its status as the state language in 1988 in one of the first steps toward independence. The first “Law on the State Language” was adopted in 1989, under the Soviet system. In 1999 the “State Language Law” was adopted and is currently in effect.



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The law designates the use of Latvian in public life, while its private use and use in private organizations is regulated only to the extent that it affects the legitimate interests of society and citizens. This provides for a huge translation industry, including all merchandize instructions, EU legislation, etc. Since independence, the Latvian language has functioned in all official spheres of activity. Its use was renewed in the state administration, armed forces and law enforcement agencies. Latvian today is the language of education for 70% of pupils in Latvian schools, and this proportion is on the rise as a result of natural tendencies and gradual educational reform. Latvian is now the language of state higher education.

Translation and the Latvian language Modern translation theories often argue that translated literature and texts are not perceived as a system in their own right but as an integral part of the polysystem of the receptive culture (Even-Zohar 1978), where it can assume a secondary or primary position. In the latter case it actively models the target literature, culture and also language. Similarly, translators are viewed as agents furthering various literary and political interests (Milton 2009). Latvian language and culture have always been receptive to outside influence – the writing system was actually shaped by the German nobility in the seventeenth century and the first genuine literary attempts in the nineteenth century were translations and imitations of Western literature. When the local population became mobile in the nineteenth century, it became largely multilingual (Latvian, Russian and German). The dominant contact language has historically shifted from German to Russian toward the end of the nineteenth century and English at the end of the twentieth century. Speaking of the role of translators in shaping linguistic conventions, one must recognize the limits to the translator’s independence (especially under a totalitarian system where all publishing is controlled, monitored and supervised). Translation cannot escape the well-known tendencies of most political structures to control – at least partially – the relationships between the territory and other cultural units (Lambert 1995: 100), but there are always some exceptions (proving the general rule). Thus, during the Soviet period, A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh was given an excellent translation in Latvian that used novel and elegant language. Because it was considered by the authorities to be a classic and an innocent book for children, it managed to escape the usual linguistic straightjacketing. At the opposite extreme, the translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) into Latvian in 1973 was so extensively purged and altered politically, ideologically and linguistically that it was retranslated by the same translator in 2002 and published with a statement on the cover that the new version did not contain any censorial restrictions and is in fact a totally different rendering of the source text.

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

Political change in the early 1990s, after the country had regained independence and was opened up to outside/Western influences – a period referred to in Latvia as the Awakening – led to a cultural reorientation under the massive influence of English, reflected in, among other things, an enormous number of borrowings to fill linguistic lacunae. These changes were not merely superficial, however. They influenced deeper linguistic structures and phenomena, including conventions of language use.

Translation, globalization and language There is much asymmetrical cultural exchange taking place between minor and major cultures and languages. As suggested by Toury (1995), dominant cultures tend to impose their own linguistic and cultural conventions in the translation of minority language cultures. But we can also observe a complimentary process – that of minor cultures absorbing (willingly or not) the dictum of the more pervasive or prestigious cultures, modifying their own conventions according to the changing situation or in response to hegemoic pressure from the prestige languages. To the extent that linguistic processes are less subject to conscious rationalizing than many others, they reflect the essence of cultural processes more clearly (Hymes 1983: 24). Thus, English, apart from its general cultural weight as symbolizing the free world, carries with it the additional attraction of a once forbidden fruit, and so has had an immense impact on the “information-starved” masses of the former Soviet space. Moreover, minor cultures tend to be more familiar with the major ones (Zauberga 2005: 68) than vice versa. Hence, they are more prone to linguistic borrowing, imitation and adaptation. In addition, globalization appears to support foreignizing tendencies in translation. This shift in translation practice signifies a major reorientation toward the western world and toward English in particular. A huge change in the whole pattern of translation has occurred, as suggested by the following statistics on the translation of fiction into Latvian: 1985 1994 2004 2007

209 books translated; 519 books translated; 679 books translated; 844 books translated;

140 Russian: 9 English 40 Russian: 243 English 68 Russian: 359 English 89 Russian: 481 English

(proportion 15: 1) (proportion 1: 6) (proportion 1: 6) (proportion 1: 5.5)

Translations of fiction from other languages today are below the level of Russian. English translations on average constitute two thirds of the total. It is interesting to note that during the Soviet period translations from Russian also constituted two thirds of all fiction translations. However, translations of fictional works constitute only the tip of the iceberg in this linguistic shift, as the proportion of fiction among translated texts consumed by readers and listeners today is extremely small. In fact, Latvians live in a translated world where about 70% of all texts read and heard by a typical Latvian are translations (Veisbergs 2005). Taking into account the dominant Latvian tradition of



The other polysystem 

fidelity to the source text, such a proportion cannot but have a huge impact on the Latvian language. As English began to replace Russian as the main contact and intermediary language, it not only exerted direct linguistic influence in the form of loans but also brought about certain readjustments in the linguistic conventions of Latvian. The primary agent of this change seems to have been English, which is textually a much more pliable and creative language, and where nonce-use has a prominent function as part and parcel of the conventions of language use. Openness and democracy also encouraged a general change in Latvian norms and conventions in the form of a more colloquial style in the general language used by most media and a freer use of substandard lexis in printed media, which was formerly taboo. It would be impossible to say whether this is a transfer of English conventions, thus a contact-induced change (Thomason, 2007: 41), or just the result of what could be called democratization of the society’s language, naturally involving the use of more democratic speech conventions. There is a confusion or blending of styles in many media. This shift applies both to the written/oral divide and to the class/educational register. In addition, one cannot ignore the general switch from reading to watching, from traditional sources of information to postmodern ones, which also contributes to the above. According to publication statistics taken from the annual Latvian press reviews (Latvijas Prese, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008), the annual number of published books in Latvia has increased by 10% since 1998. However, the total number of copies of books published annually has decreased by 26% in the same period. 2,855 books were published in 2008, 2,447of which were in Latvian (an increase from 2005). Other language publications in Latvia demonstrate a constant decrease since 2005. In 2008, the greatest number of non-Latvian books were in Russian (143), English (61) and German (4). 69%, or 1,963 books, were original works in different languages, 1,634 of which represent original Latvian writing, and 31% were translations (a 3% drop since 2007).

Publications in 2008 include: Fiction – 727 titles (Latvian fiction – 321 titles) Children’s and adolescents’ books – 244 titles Scientific literature – 385 titles Popular science books – 167 titles Textbooks – 434 titles Books on religion – 87 titles Encyclopaedias – 19 Dictionaries – 39 Tourist guides – 51 ‘Book type calendars’– 15 titles

The number of books per capita has been fluctuating from 2 to 2.3 over the last few years. This corresponds to the level in 1936 when, during the first period of Latvian

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

independence, 2.1 books per capita were published in Latvia. 10.6 publications per capita, a peak in the number of books per capita, was observed in 1991 – the year Latvia’s independence was restored. In 2008, 431 periodicals (journals, magazines, bulletins) were published, slightly more than in previous years (412 periodicals were published in 2007, 387 – in 2006, 366 – in 2005, 353 – in 2004, 340 – in 2003 and 365 – in 2002). The number of newspapers increased from 248 in 2006 to 262 in 2008, but the overall number of copies has decreased from 2.7 million in 2006 to 2.2 million in 2008, following a consistent increase in previous years. Latvians, it seems, are getting used to reading news on the Internet. The shifts are more visible in new kinds of communication – printed press, radio, audiovisual and the Internet – as opposed to in traditional venues – printed literary works and educational materials, such as textbooks. Localization, or the adaptation of the foreign to the locally known and topical, and the compression of information in the mass media continue to generate stereotypical language formulae that find their expression in new clichés. Many clichés are borrowed via covert translations. Thus stereotypical formulae in the modern media abound in ad hoc vocabulary, neologisms, loans and calques. Borrowings in the media outnumber new Latvian coinages. A considerable number (about 60 per cent) of fictional works are translations – noticeably more than in other genres. The prevalence of translations would seem to indicate the primary position of translations in the Latvian literary polysystem. People read translations more than they do Latvian originals, but even the latter are influenced by foreign patterns. Translated literature sets the norms for the language as a whole. Today, English patterns exert the greatest influence on original Latvian writing.

Norms and conventions Norms are shared expectations of what is culturally appropriate and desirable. They are less strict than unchangeable rules and differ from idiosyncrasies in the large number of people who share them (see Toury 1995). The norms governing translation have been thoroughly considered by Gideon Toury (1995, 1999), Andrew Chesterman (1997), Daniel Simeoni (1998), Theo Hermans (1999), Christina Schäffner (2004) and others. In translation, Toury views norms as “the translation of general values or ideas shared by a community [...] into performance instructions appropriate for and applicable to particular situations, specifying what is prescribed and forbidden as well as what is tolerated and permitted in a certain behavioural dimension” (Toury 1995: 54–55). Toury’s (1999) set of preliminary, initial and operational norms provides a useful framework for considering the indicators of norm shifts in Latvia.



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Preliminary norms Preliminary norms determine the general translation strategy and the choice of works for translation. Policy in the field of translation is one of the indicators that reveal preliminary norms. Much can be said about policy if one considers the initiators of the translation process. In Latvia, publishers insist that they are the ones who take an initial liking to a book and, then, start searching for a translator who can do the work for them. Translators, on their part, proudly announce that they are the “mothers” or “fathers” of certain translated books in Latvia. This, however, is rarer. Advertising is another factor that reveals a society’s policy toward translation. A lack of high-quality advertising is a problem that still persists in Latvia today. Some improvement has occurred, however, thanks to book fairs, which are a strong tool in promoting literature abroad, especially judging by the number of translations initiated for such events. In 2008, plans were made to publish more than fifteen books by Latvian authors in Sweden, “including, among others, a collection of poetry by Knuts Skujenieks; Alberts Bels’s novel “Cilvēki laivās” (People in Boats); Nora Ikstena’s novel “Dzīves svinēšana” (A Celebration of Life); Laima Muktupāvela’s novel “Šampinjonu Derība” (The Champignon Testament); an anthology of contemporary Latvian stories and poetry; a collection of poetry and stories dedicated to Riga; and a collection of mythological folk songs”(http://www.literature.lv). The policy shifts correlate with the shift in another of Toury’s preliminary norms – directionality. Directionality deals with linguistic preferences, with the question of whether books are translations from the source language or from another language (indirect translation), and with financing and other related matters. Books were translated into Latvian from 21 languages in 2006. The majority of translations were from English – 197 titles, followed by German – 31, French – 21, and Russian – 17 titles. A smaller number of titles were translations from Swedish – 9, Spanish – 8, Danish – 6, Italian – 5, followed by Lithuanian – 4, Norwegian – 4, Czech – 2, Estonian – 2, Finnish – 2, Japanese – 2, Ukrainian – 1, Dutch – 1, Portuguese – 1, Catalan – 1, Polish – 1, Chinese – 1, and Ancient Greek – 1. Serbian and Icelandic were added to the spread in 2007. In 2008, works by Bulgarian and Hungarian authors were translated as well. Translations from Russian occupy fourth place according to the number of titles; however, the influence of the Russian language might be slightly greater than one can judge from the official statistics. Publishers in Latvia sometimes express the suspicion that some translators use another translation – i.e, the Russian one – as the source. This rumor is very old, and there is no extensive research data available that can prove or disapprove it. However, some facts indicate that such indirect translation does indeed happen, even today.1 In any case, while indirect translations are not condoned in Latvia 1. As indicated by Guntis Berelis (2007), Stephen King’s novel Misery was translated into Latvian under the influence of a very bad Russian translation – in fact, many parts of the Latvian text have been translated directly from the Russian. For example, the protagonist, Sheldon, at one point hears an utterance: “I am your fan number-one.” However, in the Latvian translation

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

and compose only a very small percent of translations, they are tolerated to a certain degree. This is a dangerous thing as they might introduce substantial distortions to the originals and transfer into Latvian the effects of a politically-imposed censorship exercised in a different country. Indirect translations are sometimes caused in Latvian, as in other languages, by the unavailability of a translator for some exotic languages. Therefore, publishers might try to persuade a copyright agency to allow them to translate a particular text from the Russian translation, for example. However, a lack of importance attributed to the source text in the target culture is not the cause of indirect translations in Latvia as source texts are still treated with great respect. Of course, translators sometimes consult translations into other languages as a source for solutions to some translation problems. In the case of translations of Umberto Eco’s works, it is well known that Eco highly trusts his Russian translator, Elena Kostioukovitch. In this case, the Russian translation is considered to be a very authoritative source for solutions. Research into the publishing market in Latvia has been carried out by the Council of Europe, UNESCO and the Organisation of German Publishers (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels). The results of this research were published in 2000 and noted that Latvian “professional translators (mostly elderly people) have a university-level language education. Quite often they translate from two, three or more languages and the majority of them translate from Russian, although nowadays publications of English and German literature take ca. 65% of all translated works” (Boguta 2000). The composition of the translator pool since Boguta and his colleagues’ research has changed as younger translators, graduates from university translation programs among them, enter the literary translation market. Funding is the final aspect of directionality to be analyzed. Many translations in Latvia are supported by the Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, the Nordic Council of Ministers’ programs in Latvia, the Cultural and Co-operation Centre of France, and others. However, translations of the national literature into other languages is not promoted as vigorously by Latvia as it is by Latvia’s neighbor, Lithuania. In Lithuania, a foreign publishing house often acts as the initiator of a translation, while the Lithuanian government works to promote the translation and sometimes lends financial support (http://www.booksfromlithuania.lt). As a result, the number of Lithuanian works translated into other languages is twice that of those translated from Latvian. Translations into smaller languages appear as a new trend both in Latvia and in Lithuania and can be considered an indication of a norm shift. it is rendered by a nonsensical “brunn hunn orrrrnnnn” (reminiscent of the Latvian word for ‘brown’) that is also found in the Russian translation (“Коричневый ухмуууу йерннн”). Further on, an utterance by the same voice “red everrrrrythinggg” becomes in the Latvian translation “visss sssāāāārrrtssssss” (everything is red), evidently from the Russian (“крррасное все крррасное” [red, everything is red]). Moreover, numerous passages of the English text have been lost in the Latvian translation, and notably, these are the same omissions made in the Russian version.



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Pavel Štoll from the Charles University’s Baltic Studies Department (Prague) maintains: “They [Latvians] draw on an exceptionally rich tradition of folklore. ... This tradition has to a great extent influenced not only the character of Latvian modern art, but also the nation’s language and mentality” (http://svetknihy.cz). Today readers are encouraged to tap into this intrinsic source and to write stories similar to those of “real” authors. The translation of the Lithuanian author Edmund Katan’s book Women and Lovers (2007) into Latvian triggered the writing of many similar works by amateur writers. The translation’s publisher, Tapals, organized a competition in 2007 to encourage Latvians to write stories – school-type essays – that were awarded prizes and published on the Internet. The translation of Women and Lovers, a book without any notable literary value (Jundze 2009) that describes a string of love affairs, became a source of TV programs, articles in women’s magazines, and Internet competitions probably due to the halo effect of the book’s popularity in Lithuania; the Latvian readers assumed that a book written in a neighboring country might provide a better understanding of human relationships in Latvia than publications by authors from far-away countries. Thus, all the preliminary norms reveal a larger or smaller shift.

Initial norms Initial norms govern the translator’s decision as to whether to adhere primarily to the source text or to the target culture (adequacy versus acceptability) (Toury 1995). Contemporary Latvian translators who were raised in a tradition of adherence to the source text and now work in the relative freedom of post-communist Latvia are in many cases undecided about which culture to adhere to; hence, the inconsistency of their strategies. For example, adherence to the source culture led Inta Jansone, the translator of Katan’s book, to retain the Lithuanian cultural realia in some cases (i.e., Lithuanian currency). However, an attempt to reach acceptability targets led the translator to render the verses of popular Lithuanian songs as popular Latvian ones. Yet, improper choice of lexis (outdated vocabulary in general and slang in particular) in this and other translations stymied any aspirations to greater acceptability.

Operational norms Operational norms govern the specific decisions made during the translation process. These norms are used creatively in the best recent translations into Latvian, leading translators to create new ad hoc vocabulary out of existing language material. For example, the translator Karīna Tillberga has composed a variety of new words in her translation of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King into Latvian (2006). Some of the translator’s solutions purposefully retain the source influence. For example, in the sentence “Ak vai, mana ne-realitāte!” (Belovs, 2006: 335), the Latvian ne-realitāte is coined following the English pattern, as hyphenation is not a characteristic feature of the

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

Latvian word formation. The translator’s intuitive adherence to the norm and her recognition of the latest shifts in Latvian culture has contributed to the popularity of Saul Bellow’s writing in Latvia.

Other translated texts Translations of fiction constitute only a very small part of all translated texts (perhaps less than one percent), and Latvia has a huge translation market for a small country. The legislation establishing Latvian as the official language requires that all information concerning consumers must be made be available in Latvian. This affects not only outdoor signage but also product descriptions, instructions, etc. The law is generally observed and product distributors supply the necessary information. This is an enormous translation market, although it is not always well-paid and varies in quality. This huge translation market certainly affects the Latvian language, in some cases expanding the lexical potential of Latvian, in others reinforcing careless and sometimes incorrect language use. The State Language Centre has some authority and can penalize abusers of the state language, but generally it issues only warnings with a demand for correction. The integration of Latvia into the European Union has made it necessary to translate all EU legal acts, totalling almost 145,000 pages of text. The Translation and Terminology Centre (TTC) was established to cope with this daunting task. After accession, the translation agencies of the European Union have been carrying out the translation of these legal acts. The translation process has significantly contributed to the general development of the Latvian language, to its competitiveness and to the consolidation of its status. The total number of terms excerpted for translation needs in the period from 1997 to 2005 exceeded 100 000. For the sake of comparison, the total accomplishment of the Terminology Commission of the Latvian Academy of Sciences in 50 years (according to the number of terms published in the Bulletins of the Terminology Commission) was approximately half the size. Most of the terminological work was not connected with the creation of neologisms as new notions in the Latvian language were related mainly to the initial stage of acquis translations, when there was a need to find Latvian equivalents for many EU terms. Yet specific terminological items relating to unknown species of animals, fish, insects, etc. demanded new creations. There are more than 350 000 term entries accessible today on the Internet database www.ttc.lv.

Translations and original writing The dichotomy of target language and source language is as old as translation itself. Traditionally, translation theory, contrastive and corpus linguistics, and lexicography



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operate on the basis of this dichotomy. However, the pervasiveness of translation in the modern, globalized world – and especially in “minor” cultures like Latvia – puts the dichotomy under serious question (Veisbergs 2008). A sharp distinction between the two is further complicated by the broad range of translated texts, from carefully domesticated and meticulously edited texts to carelessly done and/or foreignized texts. Parallel texts (Hartmann 1994: 293) within the framework of lexicography, corpus linguistics and translation studies are usually divided into texts that are the result of translation (often called bitexts or translated texts) and independently formulated texts (comparable texts) (Hartmann 2001: 105) matched by the same topic, similar discourse participants, and footing, i.e., their intertextuality. The latter are viewed as more appropriate for linguistic processing, contrastive and textual analysis, while the former are treated with suspicion as they might contain features (slips, shifts, wrong usage) inherent in translations. Such features, which work against what is called naturalness (Lewandowska 2001: 177), are viewed as alien, and translation language as constrained language production (Toury 1995). Naturalness is interpreted in terms of frequency and preference in native texts, from which translation language allegedly deviates. Deviations of this kind constitute translationese and are usually ascribed to the interference of the source language (Lewandowska 2001: 178) as they breach target language norms. Even deliberately covert translations that conform to target text-type norms (not to speak of overt ones) may contain linguistic features that have different distributions when compared to non-translated parallel texts (Chesterman 1999: 51). While less frequent in domesticated translations, these features would be more pronounced in translations done according to foreignizing strategies, “deviating from prevailing domestic values” (Venuti 1998: 240). In no way disputing the theoretical possibility of differentiating between the translation texts and native texts, one might still say that a quality translation using a domestication strategy may in fact be unrecognizable as a translation, while many “native” texts exhibit breeches of norms caused by ignorance or deliberate manipulations, as well as various forms of interference. Interference (elements of one code in the context of another) is an omnibus term (Baetens-Beardsmore 1986: 45) and can be understood in a narrow or broad sense. Yet in neither sense can it be exclusively linked to translation. Interference is in fact inherent in bilingualism or multilingualism as such – a bilingual or multilingual person may/will have interference also in “native” speech without necessarily doing translation. A bilingual’s use of language will be affected by his/her knowledge of the situation, e.g., perhaps less interference in conversation with or writing for monolinguals, more for bilinguals. And so, a quality translation of a general text might not contain any elements to suggest that it is a translation – it is the subject and the foreign markers (exotic lexical elements, place names, proper names, etc.) that betray its foreign origin. On the other hand, a conversation or an Internet chat between two computer experts (whatever their nationality – Latvian, Finnish, Vietnamese) about their professional issues in their native jargon – could contain so

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

many deviations (mainly on the lexical and semantic level) that its transcript would have all the elements of an interference-saturated translation. Interference in the broader sense is not limited to formal features alone. There may be serious or not so serious interference on the semantic, pragmatic or associative level, as well, which is very difficult to trace in corpora. Moreover, there is an abundance of interlingual texts demonstrating frequent code-switching, depending on the topic, situation, and participants. So in order to find “clean,” untainted samples of speech/text, one would have to find a monolingual who is in touch only with other monolinguals of the same language and is cut off from any means of modern communication. Yet most of our contemporaries read books, or at least magazines or papers and watch TV, use the Internet, purchase imported food and goods, take medicine, etc., many of which carry translations. And so, perfect linguistic isolation would be difficult to achieve in the modern world and corpora compilers in general would find it difficult to find purely monolingual subjects. Finally, it should be noted that over time most “untranslatable” foreign items become virtually native or semi-native for the non-expert. Moreover, many modern texts are characterized by hybridity that extends in the global village not only to translations and translated texts but also to most original/ natural texts. We live in a translated world where international mass culture competes and interacts with local forms. Discursive similarities, irrespective of the language in which a text has been created, appear (Zauberga 2006: 150) and “transnational” and “translational” concepts have become synonymous (Zauberga 1999: 265). While stressing the hybrid character of modern media and intercourse, we by no means wish to suggest that this is something new – the borrowing of linguistic elements, ideas and memes has a long history. Suffice it to mention the Bible and its translations which by means of endless repetition have deeply affected the word stock, idiom stock, and metaphoric thinking of Christian societies. Yet such hybridity is more extensive today thanks to the spread of mass media and the Internet, an increase in mass migrations, and the expansion of international organizations and the global economy. Direct contact with another language increases linguistic interference and mentally affects the “naturalness” of original or native speech/text norms and conventions. Of course, the effect is intensified in countries that have an official policy of bilingualism. Such broad and pervasive influence cannot help but trigger changes in home conventions and norms, and at an amazing speed and scope. We can talk of higher or lower levels of hybridity depending on the degree of foreign element concentration (Zauberga 2006: 150), but translation certainly destabilizes cultural identities and makes it difficult to draw the line between national and international, as well as between translation and non-translation. It also undermines language purism, though not always the fears at the basis of purism. The “interference” of translated language is felt most acutely in “minor” languages, or languages of limited diffusion, such as Latvian. In post-World War II Latvia, English, apart from symbolizing the free world, held the additional attraction of a hitherto



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forbidden fruit, and so exerted an immense impact on the “information-starved” masses in Latvia. Growth of globalization in the last 20 years further enhanced the status of English. As mentioned above, translations constitute approximately 70% of the texts that an average speaker consumes in Latvia today. Translation language, then, does not represent some strange alternative idiom. It is the idiom. Therefore, while a contrastive study of broad corpora of translational language versus non-translational language certainly can produce some data on the peculiarities of the former (i.e., particular types of interference within a concrete language pair, concrete domain, and the treatment of unique items), the modern situation in Latvia makes any clear delineation of the two impractical and often impossible. Translations are part and parcel of language use and thus part and parcel of any corpus of the contemporary Latvian language.

Linguistic impact of translated texts The influence of English on Latvian lexis and semantics is easiest to perceive and analyze, but the influence of English is also reflected in grammatical constructions, spelling norms (use of multiple initial capitals in complex names and titles is growing), and even in the Latvian phonetic system. It should be emphasized that the material for this corpus has been gleaned from “original” Latvian texts (reflecting only written language, which is always more conservative and rule bound than spoken language). The presence of some covert translations might naturally be expected.

Phrase level and grammar The influence of English is observed in constructions and phrases from English that enter Latvian original literary writing as calques, making it sound “foreignized”: “Apsēžos uz aizvērta poda, atstutēju kājas pret vannas malu un saprotu, ka aizmigt man nebūs iespējams” (Krivade, 2006: 64). (I sit down on the toilet bowl, place my feet against the tub and realize that it will be impossible for me to sleep). A more traditional Latvian structure would be “es nevarēšu aizmigt” (I won’t be able to fall asleep). “Es saku: nē, jo man nav spēka labās gaumes robežām” (Krivade, 2006: 64). (I say “no”, as I’m too exhausted for [to stay within] the limits of good taste). A more traditional Latvian phrase would be: “man nav spēka domāt par labo gaumi” (literally, “I’m too exhausted to think about good taste”). “Es nespēju koncentrēt gribu, lai nepiekristu.” (Krivade, 2006: 64) (I cannot concentrate the will to disagree), instead of the more traditional Latvian “Es nespēju saņemties” (I cannot pull myself together). “Kaķītis tomēr izrādās apvainojies, izvairās no kontakta un bez mitas sev pārmazgā ausis” (Krivade, 2006: 68). (The kitty is offended after all, avoids contact,

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

and keeps cleaning its ears). A more traditional way of expressing it in Latvian – “[..] vairās no manis, un bez mitas mazgā ausis” (“[..] avoids me, and keeps cleaning ears” – without a possessive pronoun; the use of the pronoun “its” happens due to the influence of English. Some Russian influence is also observed, mainly in the use of Russian words, like the particles nu and a “Un tad man ienāk prātā tāda pavisam dumja doma – a ja nu tie nemaz nav putni?” (Bankovskis, 2006: 10) (And then a stupid thought enters my mind – but what if they are not birds?) Although bet is the Latvian counterpart for the conjunction but, the author uses the Russian conjunction a. So while it appears that English is exerting the most influence now on Latvian, Russian influence from the Soviet period remains evident in the language.

Colloquial loans Borrowing from English and via English is in no way a new phenomenon for Latvian, as even before the recent “tsunami,” several thousand loans – mainly of a literary character – had been borrowed from English (Baldunčiks 1989). Today showerer, a substantially greater number of colloquial loan words have entered the language from English: kreizī (crazy), super (super), frīks (freak), vau (wow), kūl, kūls (cool), kamon (come on), feiss (face), fīlings (feeling), tops (top), čats (chat), čarts (chart), saits (site), meils (mail), mesidžs (message), fans (fan), sneks (snack), lūzers (loser), geits (gate), bla bla bla (blah blah blah). Other loan words have been somewhat adapted and Latvian derivatives have appeared: fīls (feeling), fakucis (fucker), fakains (fucking), tīnis (teenager), cipot (to zip), topiņš (top), topot (to top), kompis (computer), rullēt (to rule), čiksa (chick), fīča (feature), superīgs (super). Although these loans are often referred to with resentment by “cultured” Latvian speakers, their use is close to universal, especially among the younger generation. Their number, however, should not be exaggerated as there are barely one hundred such words but, their frequency of use is very high in colloquial language. Similarly Latvian slang and colloquial language also retain and continue to accumulate a fair number of Russian loans: kruts [from the Russian krutoi] (cool), fufelis [fuflo] (rubbish), besīt [besit] (drive mad), mudrīt [mudrit] (pretend to be clever), tusiņš [tusovka] (party), mož [mozh] (maybe).

Traditional neoclassical loans Neoclassical loans are words created from Greek and Latin stems, usually created in English and borrowed from English. Today we approximate that 4000–5000 new borrowings of this type (not counting specific narrow terms) have been added, such as politkorektums (political correctness), loģistika (logistics), rafinērija (refinery), multiplekss (multiplex), prezentācija (presentation), antioksidants (anti-oxidant),



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kleptokrātija (cleptocracy), monitors (monitor), koronārs (coronary), naratīvs (narrative), iniciēt (initiate), koeksistēt (coexist), komitoloģija (commitology). Thus, the recent influx is not all that extraordinary. However, it is the frequency of several hundred of these vogue words that is usually remarked upon and often deplored, e.g., konsens(u) s (consensus), interfeiss (interface), parametrs (parameter), sinerģija (synergy), paradigma (paradigm), interoperabilitāte (interoperability), inovācija (innovation), kapacitāte (capacity), eksponenciāls (exponential), reģenerācija (regeneration), eksogēns (exogenous), dihotomija (dichotomy), alianse (alliance), apropriācija (appropriation). Most of these lexemes are neoclassical internationalisms, which Latvian has borrowed in tens of thousands before. These loans are transcribed, supplied with traditional endings according to Latvian norms. They are neutral or formal and can be easily integrated into the language. Under traditional borrowing, one can also see numerous loan translations and semicalques: jā-ļautiņi (yes-men), eksvīrs (ex-husband), guļošais policists (sleeping policeman), sierburgers (cheeseburger), ziepju opera (soap opera), e-pasts (e-mail), vēstuļbumba (letter bomb), and viedkarte (smart card).

Semantic borrowing A more interesting type of semantic borrowing occurs when new meanings are added to old Latvian words (rarely) or older borrowed internationalisms due to the polysemy of their English counterparts, e.g., zvaigzne (star), vīruss (virus), pele (mouse), zālīte (grass), attīstītājs (developer), laineris (liner), zaļais (green), pīlārs (pillar), arhitektūra (architecture), sūkāt (suck), rullēt (rule). There are comparatively few Russian semantic borrowings, mostly constructions, such as pa lielam [po bolshemu] (broadly), nu neko sev [nu nichego sebe] (incredible). The importation of English meanings has led to great shifts in the so-called “false friends” category: biljons (billion), dekāde (decade), ambulance (ambulance), studija (study), aktivitāte (acivity), kapacitāte (capacity), konservācija (conservation), romance (romance), konspirācija (conspiracy), asistēt (to assist). For example, kapacitāte was formerly a physics term only, but now it is frequently used in the meaning of ‘ability.’ Ambulance in the past was an “outpatient doctor’s office,” while today it is more frequently used in the meaning of ‘first aid van,” and klasificēts (classified) formerly meant ‘arranged’and now also means ‘secret.’ The shift has come about from a realignment of the Latvian meaning system from one that was similar to Russian to one that is more similar to English. As a result many false friends of the old Latvian-English language pair have become “true friends” in the new Latvian-English dichotomy. Consequently, they have often become false friends in the new Russian-Latvian dichotomy, unless a similar change takes place also in Russian. Expansion of polysemy has occurred and, although it is sometimes resisted (as it occasionally creates misunderstanding), the likely outcome will be a permanent change in the meaning of these Latvian words. The collateral process is the less frequent use of

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

these words with their traditional meanings. Apart from new meanings, a broadening of meaning can be noted in many cases, such as produkts (product) and pārdot (to sell). For example, if pārdot was normally used for things, it is now also used for ideas, the party line, yourself, which occasionally creates problems as the old meaning of sell (to betray) is still there. Real change of meaning in monosemantic words under the influence of English is as yet rare. The word drastisks (drastic), formerly meaning ‘rough,’ ‘playful,’ or ‘carefree’ tends to be used more and more with the English meaning of ‘radical,’ or ‘sharp.’ Kritisks (critical, difficult) is now frequently used for ‘very important’. Dramatisks (dramatic, as connected with plays, emotions) tends to be used with the English meaning of ‘sudden,’ or ‘striking.’ Klasificēts (classified) is used almost solely as ‘secret.’ Although it is difficult to affect such change, it generates perhaps the most apprehension as it imposes on Latvian (both borrowed and native elements) English semantic structures.

Substitution of loans Some older loans are being gradually ousted by English ones: elastība > fleksibilitāte (flexibility); prezervatīvs > kondoms (condom); pisuārs > urināls (urinal); kadri > personāls (personnel); multiplikācijas > animācijas (animation); ferments – enzīms (enzyme). The older loans were usually borrowed from Russian but are mostly of French origin. Occasionally substitution leads to the formation of etymological doublets with identical or close to identical meanings, e.g., želeja – gels (gel, jelly), novators – innovators (innovator). While analyzing a corpus of new lexis, one is struck by the fact that many new notions have acquired two lexemes in Latvian – a borrowed one and a native one, the latter created by Latvian terminologists. The loans seem to have a higher distribution and frequency of use. This can be partly explained by their relative brevity, something for Latvian terminologists to take note of: čats – tērzēšana (chatting), mediji – plašsaziņas līdzekļi (means of mass communication), spams – elektroniskais surogātpasts (electronic surrogate mail), eksplozīvs – sprādzienbīstams (explosion-dangerous), (at) mazgāšana – noziedzīgi iegūtu līdzekļu (nelikumīga) legalizācija (illegal legalization of criminally gained means), peintbols – krāslodīšu šaušanas sacensības (paint ball shooting competition).

Indirect influence and norm and convention shifts Apart from these traditional influences, one can observe a more profound phenomenon: the impact of English on Latvian lexical processes, that is, word formation patterns that affect the Latvian word stock.



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Conversion Conversion is when a word is assigned to a new class without any corresponding change in its form. Although conversion theoretically existed in Latvian (it was naturally limited by the flective nature of the language), it was a rare word formation pattern, usually applied in specific word classes or a few isolated historical cases. Cases of English-induced conversion are growing: nekrofīls (necrophile), kolektīvs (collective), reljefs (relief), analogs (analogue), poligēns (polygenic), kontraceptīvs (contraceptive), hibrīds (hybrid), kuriozs (curious), oficiozs (official), normatīvs (normative), ambients (ambient), and pedofīls (pedophile). The new samples of conversion are all borrowings or take-overs, and are all of the adjective-noun type.

Change of plural/singular system Both international and native nouns that were previously used exclusively in either the plural or the singular in Latvian (Baldunčiks 2005) have how developed a full paradigm, although many people still feel that the new plural or singular forms are slightly odd. New plurals and singulars are usually connected with meaning shifts: Some examples include: prasme/s (skill/s), tehnoloģija/s (technology/ies), politika/s (policy/ ies), konsekvence/s (consequence/s), competence/s (competence/ies), kvalitāte/s (quality/ies), aktivitāte/s (activity/ies), efekts/i (effect/s), vara/s (power/s), ekonomika/s (economy/ies), risk/i (risk/s), kvalifikācija/s (qualification/s), taktika/s (tactics), stratēģija/s (strategy/ies), and debate/s (debate/s).

Midclippings Some words – usually older internationalisms borrowed through Russia – have lost or are in the process of losing a syllable to conform more closely to their English counterparts: optimalizēt (optimize) aktivizēt (activate) digitalizēt (digitize) minimalizēt (minimize) komentārs (comment) implantāts (implant)

> > > > > >

optimizēt aktivēt digitizēt minimizēt koments implants

Perhaps the principle of economy is also at work here as some English compounds are sometimes back-clipped: veikot (to wakeboard), kaitot (to kiteboard), snovot (to snowboard), baskets (basketball); and syllables are also dropped in words that contain them in English: multlingv(āl)isms, bilingv(āl)isms, angli(ci)sms, rusi(ci)sms.

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

Negative attributes Another category of words that appears to be under the influence of English is that of negative attributes formed on the basis of nouns in the genitive case (instead of the more typically Latvian negative adjective-based attributes). These include both borrowings and native words (presumably loan translations): nedzīvnieku (non-animal), nedzīvības (non-life), nepiena (non-milk), etc.

Word formation In addition to exerting a direct and indirect effect on Latvian word stock, English has also influenced some structural and systemic aspects of Latvian, as well as conventions of language use. Creativity in word formation has been extended, e.g., occasional compounding and blending has spread enormously. Previously, most “creative” formations appeared in translated texts, and practically all new formations of this type had English counterparts, mostly compounds, blends, or semiloans – the result of borrowing: Bolivuda (Bollywood), vidiots (vidiot), seksperts (sexpert), kleptokrātija (cleptocracy), lukanomika (Lukanomics), kokakolonizācija (Cocacolonization), karjerholiķis (careerholic), and sierburgers (cheeseburger). However, in a parallel process, we have witnessed a gradual increase in the number of original Latvian compounds and blends (a fair share of these have foreign components borrowed into Latvian long ago, which suggests, perhaps, a greater confidence in manipulating non-native words on the part of users). This indicates a deeper penetration into Latvian of formerly unusual patterns: varastrīce [varas trīce] ((political) powerquake) by analogy with zemestrīce (earthquake), Šmerļavuda [Šmerlis Hollywood] (Šmerlis is in the outskirts of Riga and is where the Latvian cinema industry was located), Zaķutēka [Zaķusalas diskotēka] (Zaķu Island disco), Natoremonts [NATO remonts] (NATO renovation) by analogy with eiroremonts (euro renovation). Natoremonts, however, was an ironic term referring to those officials who used NATO integration money to acquire and repair their apartments. Graphic wordplay has also become commonplace, often involving the paronymic substitution of letters or sounds, e.g., migrorajons, formed by substituting a letter in mikrorajons (micro-region, residential community), which results in the blend, meaning ‘migrants’ region.’ Or consider Valdības sastārdīšana (government composition/destruction), formed from valdības sastādīšana, meaning ‘the composition of the government,’and saārdīšana, or ‘destroying.’ Graphic wordplay is rife in Latvian advertising. Much word-formation wordplay also occurs on the Internet, especially in chat rooms, where its full potential as well as the resourcefulness of “amateurs” can be seen.

Blends Growth in the use of blends has also been noted. In the past, blending was a non-existent word formation pattern in Latvian. A few English blends were borrowed as root



The other polysystem 

words, e.g., smogs (smog), or motelis (motel). Today, however, nonce blending is rife and affects even native words: sliktenis [slikts liktenis] (bad fate); ļeņineklis [Ļeņins piemineklis] (Lenin monument); cūkmens [cūka betmens] (pig Batman), a media image of an environmental polluter; Putinočets [Putins Pinočets](Putin Pinochet); pirrastroika [pirra uzvara perestroika](Pyrrhic victory perestroika); and gastronauts [gastronomija astronauts] (gastronomy astronauts). Some of the former nonce words have gained such wide usage that they can be considered a part of the Standard Latvian lexicon, e.g., nacbols [nacionāl boļševiks] (National Bolshevik.) Systemic novelty has even broken into the traditionally conservative stronghold of Latvian terminology. If kaplete (kapsula tablete, or ‘capsule tablet’) is viewed by some as an imported blend then, for example, the more genuinely Latvian mēstule (mēslu vēstule, or ‘junk e-letter’ (spam) and atkritne (atkritumu atvilktne, or ‘waste (recycle) bin’) serve as proof that the expansion of new word formation patterns has penetrated all styles and registers of the language.

Compound phrases Compound phrases of the type on-the-spot creations and will-she-or-won’t-she-get-theguy comedy were in fact nonexistent in Latvian before the 1990s, and the hyphenated compound phrase model was certainly imported. It is interesting to note that translations into Latvian generally do not retain this pattern, while it is rife in original writings: “Izrādās, lai popularizētu Parīzes tur-noteikti-vajag-būt objektu” (Diena 2/23/2001) [In order to popularize the one-must-for-sure-be-there-site of Paris]; “Cars bija tikai peška, te-viņš-bija-te-viņš-zuda cars” (Una 11/2/2005) [The tsar was just a pawn, he-was-there-and-he-was-lost tsar]. Hyphenation is in general unusual in Latvian and can be viewed as a novel phenomenon even in short words like e-pasts (e-mail), e-pārvalde (e-government), and i-banka (Internet bank), which appeared at approximately the same time. “Temporary,” “improvised” or nonce compounds phrases, which are quite popular in English, were, however, usually not translated as compound phrases but were used from almost the very beginning exclusively in native texts. This innovation in a way bypassed the usual first “translation” stage. The reasons for borrowing the model must have been several: novelty, imitation, but mainly the same as in English – this word formation pattern is a form of expression that offers denseness of content in a rapid form. These are usually but not exclusively adjectives, which provide the writer with an almost unlimited stock of modifiers that are novel and also graphically eye-catching.

Contextual use of idoms Under the influence of English conventions and the general liberalization of norms and conventions, as well as more a playful attitude towards language, Latvian has

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs

enormously expanded the “occasional,” “contextual” (Veisbergs 1997) or “instantial” (Načisčione 2001) use of idioms, both in translated and native texts. Phraseology is no more a stock of hackneyed phrases but a great source for innovation.

Conclusions In a globalized world a growing proportion of information originates outside any given country. Approximately 70% percent of texts that an average Latvian consumes are translations, and so translated language will inevitably affect Latvian. A shift in norms and conventions – mostly toward aligning Latvian with English – can be observed. This is already the third major shift within the last two centuries – first toward German, then Russian and now toward English patterns. So, how should we interpret these changes? Should we see them as: 1. an activation of linguistic potentialities of the language under the influence of another language/culture (Veisbergs 2007), or 2. a detrimental interference, linguistic and cultural imperialism (Venuti 1995), or 3. a general standardization/homogenization of languages with a consequent loss of cultural uniqueness (Munat 2004: 115)? Perhaps the answer lies in the question. Does such activization bring with it an expansion of the linguo-stylistic potential of the language or does it oust something traditional? To put it in other words, do we see an externally-conditioned change in traditional patterns, or an enhancement of linguistic potential inherent in the language? Native speakers may even be partly conscious of this enhanced potential, as suggested by Thomason (2007: 59). In any case, little can be done to affect such change. As Toury points out, “Norms are also unstable, changing entities; not because of any intrinsic flaw but by their very nature as norms. At times, norms change rather quickly; at other times, they are more enduring” (Toury 2000: 204). It seems that Latvian, like other “minor” languages, is experiencing a period of exceptionally rapid change.

Works cited “Back to Translation as Language” (roundtable discussion). 2005. Across Languages and Cultures 6(2): 143–172. Baetens-Beardsmore Hugo. 1986. Bilingualism: Basic Principles. Clevedon: Multilingial Matters. Baldunčiks, Juris. 1989. Anglicismi latviešu valodā. Rīga: Zinātne. –—. 2005 “Neparasts daudzskaitlis mūsdienu zinātnes un izglītības valodā” . Latviešu valoda. Robežu paplašināšana. Rīga: VVK. 6–12. Belovs, Sols. 2006. Lietus pavēlnieks Hendersons. Rīga: AGB.



The other polysystem  Berelis, Guntis. 2007. “Guntis Berelis vērtē Stīvena Kinga romāna ‘Mizerija’ tulkojumu.” Literatūras mēnešraksts Karogs 7: 201–207. Boguta, Grzegorz. 2000. “Policy Review of the Latvian Book Sector.” Electronic Publishing, Books and Archives Project. Cultural Policy and Action Department DG IV: Education, Culture Youth and Sport, Environment Council of Europe, F-67075 STRASBOURG Cedex, Available online: http://www.osi.hu/cpd/governmentslovebooks/latvia01.html#contents (Accessed 12 November 2010). Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation. The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Chesterman Andrew. 1999. “Translation Typology”. In The Second Riga Symposium on Pragmatic Aspects of Translation, edited by Andrejs Veisbergs and Ieva Zauberga, 49–62. Riga: University of Latvia Press. Even-Zohar I. 1978. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” In Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Study, edited by J. Holmes, J. Lambert, and R. van den Broeck, 117–127. Leuven: ACCO. Hartmann, R.R.K. and James Gregory. 2001. Dictionary of Lexicography. London/New York: Routledge. Hartmann, R.R.K. 1994. “The Use of Parallel Text Corpora in the Generation of Translation Equivalents for Bilingual Lexicography.” In EURALEX ‘94 Proceedings, edited by Willy Martin et al., 291–297. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit. Hermans, Theo. 1999. “Translation and Normativity.” In Translation and Norms, edited by Christina Schäffner, 51–72. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hymes, D. H. 1983. “Notes toward a History of Linguistic Anthropology.” In Essays in the History of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by D. H. Hymes, 1–57. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jirgens, Karl. 2006. “Fusions of Discourse: Postcolonial/Postmodern Horizons in Baltic Culture.” In Baltic Postcolonialism, edited by Kellertas Violeta, 45–81. Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi. Jundze, Arno. 2009. “Trīs māsas jeb Stāsts par neesošo vienoto kultūrtelpu. Neatkarīgā 19. februāris. Rīga. Available online: http://www.nra.lv/zinas/17381-tris-masas-jeb-stasts-parneesoso-vienoto-kulturtelpu.htm (Accessed 3 March, 2010) Katans, Edmunds. 2007. Sievietes un mīļākie. Rīga: Tapals. Krivade, Agnese. 2006. “Desmit dienu diēta.” In Stāsti. Prozas lasījumi klātienē un neklātienē, 63–72. Rīga: Dienas Grāmata. Lambert, José. (1995) “Literatures, Translation and (De) colonisation.” In Translation and Modernisation. Proceedings of the 13th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, 98–118. Tokyo: ICLA. Latvijas Prese 2002. 2003. Statistiko materiālu krājums. Rīga: Latvijas Bibliogrāfijas institūts. Latvijas Prese 2003. 2004. Statistiko materiālu krājums. Rīga: Latvijas Bibliogrāfijas institūts. Latvijas Prese 2004. 2005. Statistiko materiālu krājums. Rīga: Latvijas Bibliogrāfijas institūts. Latvijas Prese 2005. 2006. Statistiko materiālu krājums. Rīga: Latvijas Bibliogrāfijas institūts. Latvijas Prese 2006. 2007. Statistiko materiālu krājums. Rīga: Latvijas Bibliogrāfijas institūts. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara. 2001. “Dictionaries, Language Corpora and Naturalness in Translation.” In Translation and Meaning. Part 5, edited by Marcel Thelen, 177–185. Maastricht: UPM. Milton, John and Paul Bandia (eds). 2009. Agents of Translation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

 Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs Munat, J. 2004. “A Case Study in Cross-cultural Translation: TINTIN in English and Italian.” In Contrastive and Applied Linguistics 12, edited by A. Veisbergs, 101–120. Riga: SVTN. Naciscione, Anita. 2001. Phraseological Units in Discourse. Riga: LAC. Schäffner, Christina. 2004. “Sprach- und Textnormen als Übersetzungsproblem aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Sicht.” In Übersetzung. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung. 1. Teilband, edited by H. Kittel et al., 483–493. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Simeoni, Daniel. 1998. “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus.” Target 10.1: 1–39 Štoll, Pavel. 2006. “A Brief Look at Latvian Poetry. Interview with Pavel Štoll from the Charles University’s Baltic Studies Department about the Brand New Anthology of Latvian Poetry – 15 x Poetry Latvia.” In BookWorldPrague. 12th International Book Fair and Literary Festival. FairNews, 4 May, 2006. http://svetknihy.cz/archiv/sk2006/userdata/files/Veletrzni_ listy_1-2006.pdf (accessed on 12 December, 2009) Thomason, Sarah. 2007. “Language Contact and Deliberate Change.” Journal of Language Contact. 1: 41–62. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. –—. 1999. “A Handful of Paragraphs on ‘Translation’ and ‘Norms’.” In Translation and Norms, edited by Christina Schäffner, 9–31. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. –—. 2000. “The Nature and Roles of Norms in Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, 198–213. London, New York: Routledge. Veisbergs, Andrejs. 1997. “The Contextual Use of Idioms, Wordplay and Translation.” In Traductio. Essays on Punning and Translation, edited by D. Delabastita, 155–176. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. –—. 2005. “Tulkojumspiediens – guvums vai apdraudējums?” Valsts Valodas Komisija. Raksti. 1.sējums: 187–201. –—. 2007. “Occasional and Systematic Shifts in Word-formation and Idiom use in Latvian as a Result of Translation. In Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts, Vol. 58, edited by Judith Munat, 239–263. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. –—. 2008. “The Lost Dichotomy: When ‘Translation Language’ Becomes the ‘Real’ One.” In Proceedings. Actes of the 18th World Congress of the International Federation of Translators, 73–74. Shanghai: Foreign Languages Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London/New York: Routledge. –—. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London/New York: Routledge. Zauberga, Ieva. 1999. “Hybridity as Inevitable Feature of Cross-cultural Communication”. In The Second Riga Symposium on Pragmatic Aspects of Translation, edited by A.Veisbergs and I. Zauberga, 265–274. Riga: University of Latvia. –—. 2005. “A Knock on the Door: On the Role of Translated Literature in Cultural Image Making.” Across Languages and Cultures 6.1: 67–77. –—. 2006. “Translation as Discursive Import”. In Sociocultural Aspects of Translating and Interpreting, edited by Anthony Pym et al., 143–150. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Translation as condition and theme in Milan Kundera’s novels Jan Rubeš

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium In this chapter the author explores the problematic relationship of the Czech novelist Milan Kundera to the translation of his work. On the one hand, translation offers authors who write in languages of limited diffusion entrée onto the world stage. On the other hand, translation entails the author’s loss of control over his work. The author traces the emergence of what may be a fictitious translator, conjecturing that this translator was in fact Kundera himself. The chapter raises important questions about the translator’s agency, the nature of literature in translation, and the very idea of a national literature.

In 1975, seven years after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera left his country for France. This was at a time when Gustav Husak’s government made it easier to get rid of “anticommunist elements.” Kundera had chosen France for several reasons. First, he spoke French relatively well. In the early sixties, he had translated and published an anthology of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire. Second, his books, in particular, The Joke, had met with great success in France. Third, he was, like most Czech intellectuals, attached to the French cultural heritage. Upon his arrival in France, Kundera was known as the author of the novel The Joke (1968), a book of short stories, Laughable Loves (1970), as well as the novel Life is Elsewhere (1973). His fourth book, The Farewell Waltz, was published in 1976, several months after his arrival in France. French interest in Kundera and the success of his books in France are easy to understand. Since 1966, Czechoslovak intellectuals tried to integrate new democratic elements into political practice. At the beginning of 1968, the communist party, which until then had rejected any attempt at post-Stalinist reform, became the initiator of a process of social transformation. The role of communist intellectuals in that process was crucial. Whereas they had legitimized the cultural policy of the party since the 1950s, they suddenly became, in the context of liberalization, the most dynamic group in Czechoslovak society.

 Jan Rubeš

In France, the situation of a number of very well-known intellectuals who had joined the communist party after World War II was similar. Their aspirations appeared increasingly at odds with the conservative elements of the Central Committee (Maurice Thorez, Waldeck-Rochet, Georges Marchais). The Czech reform process therefore justified, in their eyes, similar reforms inside the French communist party. One of the prominent French intellectuals representing this current was Louis Aragon. With his wife, Elsa Triolet, he traveled often through Czechoslovakia on his way to Moscow, and was always received by the highest political and cultural authorities. In 1967, one of Aragon’s friends in Prague, Antonin Leihm, a journalist, translator and cinema critic, drew his attention to a recently published book by Kundera, The Joke. Some months later, Aragon introduced Liehm and Kundera to the best publishing house in France, Gallimard, and convinced its director, Claude Gallimard, that the novel was worth publishing in French translation. The novel was translated by Marcel Aymonin and published with Aragon’s now famous preface, entitled “A Novel I Consider a Major Work.” The book came out in the autumn of 1968, soon after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. This combination of events resulted in French readers being extremely interested in this book and, thanks also to its literary qualities, The Joke became an immediate success. Marcel Aymonin, who translated The Joke into French, played a very interesting role in Kundera’s literary career. Aymonin, a French citizen, arrived in Prague in 1948 as the cultural attaché in the French embassy and the new director of the Ernest Denis French Institute. Three years later, in 1951, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed the French embassy of its decision to close the French Institute. Its employees had to leave Czechoslovakia within twenty days. Four days before the deadline, Aymonin asked for political asylum in Prague. The Czechoslovak security services organized a press conference where Aymonin publicly denounced various people who were working with him as spies and enemy agents of the Czechoslovak communist regime, including French diplomats and Czech citizens. Some of the Czechs were arrested and sentenced to as many as twenty five years in prison.1 In the years following, Aymonin lived in Prague and worked as an assistant professor in the French department at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. He was charged in France “in absentia,” but was pardoned in the 1960s. After the Soviet invasion in 1968 he left Czechoslovakia for France, where he taught Czech at the University of Nanterre, near Paris. In Prague, Aymonin was the only French intellectual the party could trust. He soon established himself as the exclusive French translator of Czech authors. First, he translated novels written in the spirit of socialist realism (Julius Fucik’s People, Be Vigilant, Antonin Zapotocky’s New Combatants Will Come, and Jan Drda’s The Silent Barricade), then Czech classics, such as the works of Karel Čapek, and finally, contemporary authors. Many of these translations were published by Orbis, Artia, and other Czech publishing houses in order to promote Czech literature abroad. Aymonin’s 1.

Pospišil, for example. His wife was sentenced to fifteen years. Both were later amnestied.



Translation as condition and theme in Milan Kundera’s novels 

quasi-monopoly over French translation of Czech literature was confirmed in the 1960s when France saw an increased interest in Czech literature. Aymonin translated books and plays by the philosopher Karel Kosik, the novelist Jiři Sotola, and the playwright Vaclav Havel. It would seem that none of these young authors knew anything about his political past and the denunciation campaign of 1951. By the 1960s, Aymonin had established a reputation as an important cultural figure and was well known in Prague intellectual and political circles. A notorious womanizer, he enjoyed the social atmosphere of Prague in the mid-sixties, as described by Kundera in Laughable Loves. And so, it was only natural that he was asked to translate The Joke. Since his arrival in France in 1975, Kundera has progressively modified his own image, although he has never admitted it. His intention was undoubtedly sincere: Events, such as the Prague Spring, the Soviet invasion, his semi-clandestine literary activity, and subsequent exile, had changed him, and so upon his arrival in France, he severed all relations with Czechoslovakia. In the process, he presented himself exclusively as a novelist, denying any association with official Czech cultural policy, saying nothing about his politically engaged poetry, or about his plays and essays, which had been published in Prague. Aymonin’s name, however, continued to link him to the past. In France, where the Aymonin case was well known, Kundera attempted to make sure that his name was never again associated with Aymonin’s. At the same time, he expressed disappointment over the quality of the French translation of The Joke: “In 1968 and 1969 The Joke was translated into all western languages. How sad! In France, the translator has practically rewritten my novel, completely changing my style.... I have found a translator friend who is faithful and admirable, François Kérel.... So, because all the changes made in the second version of The Joke in 1980 seemed to me inadequate, I decided to work on the translation once again, from top to bottom, and I revised all my books published in France” (1985: 89).2 Consequently, Kundera’s connection with Aymonin came to an end. In 1982, Aragon died and in 1985 the new translation of The Joke was published without his preface. Kundera has argued that Aragon’s preface was essentially political and did not adequately treat the literary qualities of the novel, but it appears he may also have wished to end his association with the life-long communist.3 Since emigrating to France, Kundera has found himself in the peculiar situation of a writer condemned to communicate with his readers essentially through translation. Although his books were published in Czech by a publishing house in Toronto founded by the exiled Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, none of them reached readers in his home country, where they were banned; few people in Czechoslovakia even knew of them. Kundera realized that he now had only one, exclusive reader: his French translator, François Kérel. “While writing The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Kundera said, “I thought very often about Prague, but did I think about my Czech readers? The only 2. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated. 3.

Aragon remained a member of the French communist party until his death.

 Jan Rubeš

person I really thought about was François Kérel, who had to translate my manuscript. As I formed my sentences, I heard as an echo their future French version. Closely following his translation, I didn’t see any difference from the original, and I accepted to have the novel translated (in Portugal, Brazil, Greece, Sweden, Iceland, and Norwegian) from the French version, with which I identified myself ” (1985: 89). In the revised versions, Kundera insisted that the following note be included: “The French translation has the same authentic value as the Czech original.” From that moment on, many things began to change in Kundera’s style. Essentially, he no longer addressed his books to Czech readers, but to French readers or to speakers of other foreign languages. In his stories, the intimacy of the individual’s private life is constantly assaulted by social or political situations: destiny crushed by History; small personal events versus global, historical events; actors and victims; how to survive. When the subject came up of the novel having been inspired by Czech reality, Kundera had to explain certain situations, such as the political context of the Prague Spring of 1968, the history of February 1948, when the communist party seized power, the period of “normalization” and its personalities, like Gustav Husak or the pop singer Karel Gott. In addressing his books to the French reader, Kundera was constantly confronted with the difficulty of expressing the exact meaning of certain words and concepts that he had used in Czech but were altered in the French translation. This constant movement between the two languages led Kundera to compose a personal dictionary of 89 words, published in the French review Le Débat in 1985 and later, with a few corrections, in The Art of the Novel, where the list is paired down to 71 words. To be more precise, this dictionary is more like an anthology of ideas, of different perceptions of the two worlds: one objective (the word and its common denotation) and the other subjective (the connotation), based on different life experiences (in Czechoslovakia and France). He compares home for a Czech (domov) with das Heim for a German and chez-soi for a Frenchman. “Slav” for Kundera is a purely negative concept; “Soviet” is a lexical screen behind which all the Russified people of the empire hide; “Czechoslovakia” is a term Kundera never uses – it is replaced by Bohemia. The idea of a dictionary of key concepts was not a new one for the author. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of the Being, published in 1984, Kundera entitles Chapter 3 “Words Misunderstood” and provides there “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words,” containing words that are a source of misunderstanding between the two protagonists, Sabina, a Czech émigré, and Franz, her Swiss boyfriend. The dictionary contains such basic words as “Woman,” “Fidelity and Betrayal,” “Music,” “Light and darkness.” How is it possible that so many simple words have different meaning for two young people living at the same time and born less than five hundred miles apart? Is it because of language? The political context? Social conditions? Because one is a man and the other a woman? Because of their behavior? Their past? It is, of course, all of these. And this novel is to a large extent a pretext for Kundera to discuss the difficulty of understanding other people and being understood by them.



Translation as condition and theme in Milan Kundera’s novels 

The same problem, in a very different context, preoccupied another Czech writer. In 1920 Karel Čapek, who would later become a very successful author and an important figure in Czech cultural life between the two wars, published a short book entitled A Critique of Words. In the preface he explains the reason that led him to write this book: “An error, a stupidity, or a lie doesn’t begin with an idea but with a word. Because we use words more frequently than ideas, the aim of my criticism is double: First, to review the contents of a word, and second, to review the use made of a word, because it is absolutely not the same thing” (1920: iii). Čapek’s approach is essentially philological. He looks at the etymology or semantic meaning of words. But behind the linguistic commentaries there appears to be a moral intention. In the twenties Czechoslovakia was a young democracy, and Čapek was closely attached to the philosophy and ethics of the Czechoslovak philologistpresident, Tomáš Masaryk. Čapek seems to be saying that we must build our nation on a sound moral basis and that language is a tool in the struggle against lies. He would pursue this idea through to his last, unfinished book, The Life and Work of the Composer Foltyn (1938). This work is a meditation on truth and lies, about reality and appearance. The composer built an image of himself as a genius, misunderstood by society. The question that Čapek poses is a simple one: Is Foltyn, the protagonist of the novel, a genial composer or a mere swindler? Some witnesses claim his music is beautiful, while others accuse him of plagiarism. The unfinished novel doesn’t offer an answer, and Čapek may not have had one. As for Kundera, he published in 1986 The Art of the Novel, a series of essays about literature and music, some of which had already been published in various literary magazines. Although it seems to have been written in French, Kundera at the time declared: “For some years I have been trying to write articles and essays in French. But thinking and speaking are two different operations: I feel I am incapable of writing a novel in French” (1985: 89–90). Kundera’s last book written in Czech, Immortality, appeared in 1990. The French reader opening the book was surprised by at least two things. First, the topic is different from those of his earlier novels. There is nothing about Czechoslovakia, the past, or politics. There is no humor or eroticism. It is largely inspired by Kundera’s experience with French intellectual society. Second, the book was not translated by his “friend and translator,” François Kétel, but by a certain Eva Bloch. Who is this Eva Bloch? I, personally, have translated a dozen books from Czech into French and so know most, if not all, the translators working in the field, but I have never heard the name of Eva Bloch. When I asked Kundera himself who she was, he refused to say anything about her. So we might assume that she does not exist and that this book represents Kundera’s first attempt to write in French. Other books attest to this evolution and it seems evident that Kundera’s target audience has changed. It is no longer a Czech audience, just as Kundera is no longer a Czech author writing for the French reader. Kundera has become a French author writing for French readers. With the publication of Immortality, his manner of writing

 Jan Rubeš

and the aim of his writing have changed. The topics are different: Slowness (La lenteur), Identity (L’identité), and Ignorance (L’ignorance). And the storyline is reduced, giving way to reflection and commentary of philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological concepts. He is no longer occupied with Man against History, the existential tragedy of our Destiny, or humor as the last resort for victims of injustice, but rather with the illustration of ideas. This is an obvious continuation of Kundera’s fascination with translation. His latest novels appear to be an extension of his “Eighty-nine Words.” The paradoxical situation of the exiled writer has led Kundera to think in terms of translation. The first impetus to revise the translation of his most successful novel, The Joke, was partly political. Having severed all relations with his former country, Kundera tried to erase the name of Marcel Aymonin, as well as that of Louis Aragon, in order to construct an image of himself more in keeping with the spirit of the novel. At the same time, he realized that any word, any concept translated from Czech may be perceived differently, depending on a multitude of factors. To be understood well becomes a priority for him, and later an obsession. He refuses to give interviews for fear that his words would be misinterpreted. He changes translators, reworks already published translations, and asks his publishers to commission new translations. This obsession appears in his latest novels, which ask: What is slowness, what is identity, what is ignorance? Each of these novels illustrates his personal vision of these terms with the aim of being understood primarily by his French readers. Consequently, Kundera finds himself in an absurd situation. He refuses to authorize the Czech translation of his books written in French. It seems to him inconceivable that his books would be translated into his native language by a translator, while he himself will never write again in Czech. Therefore, if his compatriots wish to read Kundera’s latest books, they must read them in French, or in translations of the French into other languages. The historian of literature will always ask the question: How is it possible that Kundera’s French work is so different from the work he wrote in his Czech period? The answer must be sought first of all in his concept of literature as a medium of communication involving the interpretation of similar experiences by people from different cultural backgrounds. This becomes an important pre-occupation for many exiled writers, and for Kundera, a central topic of his fiction.

Works cited Čapek, Karel. 1920. Kritika slov. Prague: Odeon. Kundera, Milan. 1988. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Harper & Row. –—. 1985. “Quatre-ving-neuf mots.” Le Débat 37 (Nov): 87–117.

Index A A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MAHA (publishing house)  50 Abrams, M. H.  219 Aeschylus  49, 294 Afghanistan, Soviet occupation of (1980)  26 Afghanistan war (2001-present)  289 Aigi, Gennadij  122 Akhmatova, Anna  151, 190n11, 194 “Akkerman Steppe” (“Stepy akermańskie”) (Mickiewicz)  39 Album (Radko The Killer) (poetry)  7 ALF (TV show)  50 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll)  36, 180 Aliens (Cameron)  238 Andrukhovych, Yuri  33, 51 Anti-Bimmer (Goblin)  243–5 Antigone (Sophocles)  43 Aeneid (Virgil)  37–8 Andreeva-Bal’mont, E.A.  101n1, 107, 109 anti-Semitism  12, 124 Apollinaire, Guillaume  317 Appiah, Kwame Anthony  34–5 Aragon, Louis  318–19, 322 Arguedas, J.M.  205 Aristophanes  46 The Art of the Novel (1988) (Kundera)  27, 29, 320–1 Ashvaghosha  100, 107 Asturias, Miguel Ángel  211–12 Auden, W.H.  199–202 Augustine of Hippo  85 Austria  25, 27, 30, 40, 43, 119n5, 128, 138, 140, 199, 285–7 Austro-Hungarian Empire  20, 87, 138, 140 authorial identity  57, 59, 61, 63, 75, 81, 92, 106, 122, 130–1, 133–4, 243–4

avant garde poetry (Yugoslavia)  119–35 Aymonin, Marcel  318–19, 322 Azerbaijan  26 B Bakhtin, Mikhail  152 Balkans  1, 3, 20, 23–4, 138, 223–4, 226–9, 231 Bal’mont, Konstantin  97–113 and Calderón  102–4, 108 and classical antiquity texts  97, 100, 109–10 in Europe and Russia  104–7 and European culture  98–9 and European drama  101–4, 109 and the foreign  99–101 original play by  102 prolific nature of  99–100 on Shakespeare  103–4 and Shelley  99, 103, 108–9 See Sakuntala; Theater of Youth and Beauty Baltic states  12, 30, 166, 296, 303 Barańczak, Stanisław  284 barbarism  23, 112, 273 baroque translation  42 The Bartered Bride (Smetana)  43 “battle of the ballads” (1816)  55 Baer, Brian James  188, 188n4 Barnet, Miguel  205, 211, 213 Bart, István  209 Barthes, Roland  288 Bauer, Ljudevit  121 Bavaria  25 Bazhan, Mykola  46 Beat poets  51 Beckett, Samuel  51 Being and Time (Heidegger)  85 Belinskii, Vissarion  55, 69 Bellow, Saul  303 Benjamin, Walter  130, 201, 246 Berman, Antoine  13, 57, 57n3, 62n12,13, 63n15, 70, 72, 76

Bestuzhev, Aleksandr  68 Bhabha, Homi  20–1, 26 Bible  12, 37, 40–1, 225 Old Testament  12, 41, 225 New Testament  41 Bibliografiia Indii (Bibliography of India)  106 Bidney, Martin  103 Bimmer (Buslov)  243–5 Blake, William  99–100, 109n10 Blatnik, Andrej  7, 138 Blavatsky, Helena  103–4, 104n5 Bleak House (Dickens)  83 Bloch, Eva  287, 321 Blok, Aleksandr  98, 102, 111, 155 Boccaccio, Giovanni  48 Bondar, Andrii  33, 51 borders  3, 11, 19–23, 26, 29–30, 47, 93, 100, 138, 153, 227, 244, 281, 285–6 Borges, Jorge Luis  205, 211 Boris Godunov (Pushkin)  45 Bosnia-Herzogovina  6–7, 119 Bosniak  7 Bosnian language  7 Bowering, Peter  270n9 Boyd, Brian  171, 177, 179, 182–3 Bradbury, Malcolm  28, 229 The Bride of Abydos (Byron)  223–5 Briusov, Valerii  45, 101–2, 108–9, 111 Broch, Hermann  26–7, 287 Brodsky, Joseph  120, 128, 187–202 before emigration  196–9 and John Donne  192–3 northern exile of  193–6 translation debut  190–3 and W.H. Auden  199–202 Brooks, Jeffrey  157 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)  36 Brusilovskii, Evgenii  161n27 Budapest  24–5

 Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts Buddhism  103 Bulgaria  11, 22, 24–5, 100, 131, 173, 189, 194, 219–31, 301 Bulgarian Revival  219–21, 220n1 Bulgarian translation of Lord Byron  219–31 and expectations  220–2 and The Giaour  219, 224–9 and Manfred  229–31 and “otherness”  223–9 Bürger, Gottfried August  55, 63–5, 67, 69, 72 Burgess, Anthony  272 Buslov, Petr  243–5 Butler, Judith  137, 141, 145 Byron, Lord (George Gordon)  11, 68, 219–31, 39 See The Bride of Abydos; The Giaour; Manfred C Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (1600–1685)  102–4, 108 Cameron, James  238 Cantos (Pound)  47 Čapek, Karel  321 The Captive Mind (1951) (Miłosz)  20 Carlito’s Way (De Palmo)  238 Carner, Josep  36 Cassandra (Greek mythology)  280, 289, 292 Cassandra (character) (von Rezzori)  6 Catalan language  35–7, 301 Catalonia  35–7, 301 Castilian Spanish and French  35 Catherine the Great  4, 120n6 Cavalleria rusticana (Mascagni)  43 Ceaușescu, Nicolae  79–82, 84, 94 censorship  8, 9, 11, 42, 120, 123, 138, 151n3, 153–4, 153n11,14, 165, 187–202, 208, 230, 235–8, 245–6, 265, 296, 302 and film translation  236–8 and Hungary, See Hungarian translation and Soviet Union, See Joseph Brodsky Central Europe  2–3, 10, 19–30, 38

Central Europe: Core of Periphery? (Lord)  3 Cernat, Paul  80 Černov, Andrej  255–8 Cervantes, Miguel de  27, 48, 73 Chaadaev, Petr  69 Chekhov, Anton  43, 45 chernukha film period  239–240 Chernyshchevsky, Nikolai  5, 180 Chesterman, Andrew  300, 305 “The Child of Civilization” (Brodsky)  187 China  35, 89, 93, 215 Chinese language  38, 195, 214, 301 “Chinesification” (kitaizatsiia)  98 Chukovskii, Kornei  5, 194–5 Cioran, Emil  23–4, 80, 82–3 Cioran, Samuel  267–9 “clash of civilizations”  24 classical/classicist translation  42, 48, 55, 59–66, 64n16, 69–70, 74–5, 161, 209 A Clockwork Orange (Burgess)  272 Cold War  8, 11, 19–20, 22, 30, 81, 118, 171–85, 278 and translation theory  171– 85 See Roman Jakobson; Vladimir Nabokov colonialism  2, 6–7, 8n3, 33–4, 38–9, 51, 79, 94, 296 The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare)  41 communism  6, 8–13, 20–1, 24, 30, 47, 79–83, 85, 88, 93, 123n8, 124, 133, 137, 139, 152, 184n6, 205, 209, 226, 235, 270–1, 273, 279, 282–3, 285, 287–8, 294, 296, 303, 317–20 in Czechoslovakia  317–18 in Romania  79–83, 85, 88, 93 Condee, Nancy  7 Conrad, Joseph  29 Contempt (Le Mépris) (Godard)  291 cosmopolitanism  6, 277–94 A Critique of Words (Čapek)  321 Croatian language  7, 117–35, 138, 189, 198 Croatian translation  119–23, 140 and avant garde poetry  119–35 publication statistics  119

See Josip Sever; Dubravka Ugrešić; Irena Vrkljan Cross Currents (Central European periodical)  28 Cuban authors  188, 190, 194, 198, 210, 213 cultural translation  1–13, 19–21, 26, 30, 74 The Curtain (2006) (Kundera)  29–30 Cvetaeva, Marina  120, 122–4, 126–30, 133 Cvetkov, Aleksej  260–1 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand)  43 Cyrillic  7, 24, 150 Czech language  19–22, 29–30 See Jiří Levy Czech Republic  2, 5–6, 10–12, 19–22, 24–30, 39, 47, 60, 62, 65n18, 83, 100, 119, 124, 141, 173, 175, 184n6, 189, 194, 198, 222, 266, 301, 317–22 nationalists  222 Russian domination of  19–20 See Milan Kundera Czech Translation Theories (Levy)  60 Czechoslovakia  20–1, 29–30, 119, 124, 184n6, 317–21 D Daniel, Yulii  199 Dante (Dante Alighieri)  43, 47, 120 Davies, Norman  4 Dayton Agreement (1995)  6 de Chézy, A.L.  106 de la Motte Fouqué, Friedrich  67 De Palmo, Brian  238 Decameron (Boccaccio)  48 Dečki (Boys) (Novšak)  139 Delille, Jacques  61 Demirski, Paweł  277–8, 287–8, 288n12, 289n13, 291–4, 293n17 Descartes, René  85 Dibrova, Volodymyr  33, 51 Dickens, Charles  83 Discourse on the Old and New Style in the Russian Language (Shishkov)  65 Dismissing the Greek Envoys (Kochanowski)  277–8, 281–3, 285, 290, 292, 294



Index  Dobytaia muzhestvom Urvasi (Urvasi Won by Valor) (Kalidasa)  107, 109 Dolinin, Alexander  180 Don Quixote (Cervantes)  48 Donne, John  192–3 Dostoevsky, Fydor  43, 73–6, 267 “double readership”  8, 8n4 Dovlatov, Sergei  171 Drai-Khmara, Mykhailo  44 Druhe vidlunnia (Second Echo) (Kochur)  48 dubbings  236, 239, 245 Dur, Ion  85 Durdik, Josef  222 Dwyer, Tessa  8n4 dystopia  265–74 postmodern  270–4 Soviet  266–70 See Moscow 2042;We Dzhabaev, Dzhambul  11, 154, 156–60 E Eastern Bloc  9, 19, 22, 25 Eastern European identity  2–6, 8n3, 9–11, 33–4, 79–94, 97–113 and cultural belatedness  3–6 as “culture of translation”  10 as defined by colonial oppression  8n3 East-West mediator  79–94, 97–113 and “otherness”  2–3 Eco, Umberto  302 El Senor Presidente (Asturias)  211–12 “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard” (1751) (Gray)  59, 69 Eliade, Mircea  83 Eminescu, Mihai  80 Ems Edict  40–2 Eneïda (Kotliarevs’kyi)  37 Engels, Friedrich  43 Enlightenment  22–3, 155, 220 ethnic cleansing  6 Etkind, Efim  5, 8, 188, 190–5 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin)  43, 45–6, 172, 174, 176–7, 180–1 Eurasia  3, 8, 105 Eurocentrism  1, 22, 26, 99, 101, 107, 111

Even-Zohar, Itamar  5, 154n13, 297 experimental translation  48 F Fadeev, Aleksandr  156 The Farewell Waltz (1976) (Kundera)  317 Father Marek (Słowacki)  285–7, 293 Faust (Goethe)  48, 104, 165–7, 166n34 Feinberg, Leslie  141, 143–5 feminism  11, 139–41, 145 Fénelon, François  66–7 Ferdydurke (Gombrowicz)  51 Fernandez, Pablo Armando  188 Finkel, Oleksandr  45 First Congress of Soviet Writers  152, 156 Flaubert, Gustave  48 Forsiranje romana reke (Fording the Stream of Consciousness) (Ugrešić’)  118 France  182, 318 France, Anatole  46 Frank, Joseph  173, 178 French language  6, 8, 12, 19–30, 35, 38, 56, 59, 61, 65–8, 105–6, 119–20, 123, 141, 173–4, 177–8, 181, 206, 209, 221, 266, 269, 284, 293n17, 301, 310, 317–22 French poetry  45–6, 49, 56–7, 66, 107, 127 Friedberg, Maurice  34, 52, 60, 68, 76, 151, 165, 169 Friendship of the Peoples (Druzhba narodov)  161, 162n29 Fylypovych, Pavlo  44 G Gałczyński, Konstanty Ildefons  190–2, 191n12, 194 Galicia, Ukraine  39–41, 43–4 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel  49, 205, 211 Garcia-Moreno, Laura  8 Gasparov, Mikhail  153 gay literature  51, 137–45 Gender Trouble (Butler)  137, 141, 145 Gentzler, Edwin  2, 151n3

German language  8, 29, 39, 40, 56, 61–3, 65, 67–9, 71, 72n26, 73–4, 79, 87, 102, 105n6, 113, 119, 119n5, 120, 128, 133, 138–41, 173, 175, 189–90, 209, 221, 219, 254, 283–7, 297, 299, 301–2, 314, 320 German Romantics  56–7, 62n12, 72n26, 102 Germany  20, 22, 25, 30, 35, 38, 44, 56, 63, 73–4, 139–40, 151, 175, 229–30, 250, 271, 273, 282–8, 290, 295–7 See Nazi Germany Ghersini, Teodora  144 The Giaour  219, 224–9 The Gift (Nabokov)  180 Ginsburg, Mirra  267–8, 267n4 The Global Fund for Women (USA)  145 globalization  7, 33–4, 51, 248, 277, 288, 293, 298–300, 307 Gnedich, Nikolai  63–6, 68 Goblin (Dmitrii Iur’evich Puchkov)  9–11, 237–48, 252 “anti” and “pro”  243–5 as authority figure  245–8 chernukha film period  239– 240 discordant creations of  240–3 and film translation in Russia  236–8 (im)proper translations of  238–40 and The Lord of the Rings  241–5, 247 Godard, Jean-Luc  291, 294 The Godfather (Puzo)  49 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  48, 57n3, 58–9, 58n7, 61, 69, 72–4, 104–7, 113, 165–7, 169, 282, 293 Gogol, Nikolai  39, 43, 55, 57, 57n3,4, 70–4 Goldblatt, Harvey  180, 183 Gombrowicz, Witold  26, 51, 279n2, 283 The Good Soldier Švejk (Hašek)  26 Gorbachev, Mikhail  49 Gordin, Yakov  188, 192 Gorky/Gor’kii, Maxim  9, 46, 109, 111, 155 Granta  22, 27–8

 Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts Gray, Thomas  59, 67, 69 Grayson, Jane  179 Greece, ancient  38, 49, 67, 70–2, 100–2, 113, 189, 287–8, 292, 294, 301 Greek drama and Polish theater  11, 277–94 cultural politics of translation  283–4 paradox of  280–3 See Jan Kochanowski; Michał Zadara Greeks  7–8, 11, 38, 49, 56, 66–7, 71, 73, 82, 100–2, 105, 108, 189, 198, 221–2, 244n5, 225–6, 277–94 language of  66 and metrical forms  56 and Russia  66–7 Green, Michael  102 Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (A Tomb for Boris Davidovič) (Kiš)  124 Grotowski, Jerzy  287 Grudinina, Natalya  193–5 Guerney, Bernard Guilbert  267– 9 Gulag  44–7, 49 Gumilev, Nikolai  155 H Habsburg Monarchy  26, 39, 41, 138 Hafiz (Persian poet)  49 Hamlet translations  51, 165, 165n32, 249–62 and the literary canon  250–1 during 1950–80s  252 between  1999–2008, 251–61 Russian phenomenon of  249–52 See Andrej Černov; Vitalij Poplavskij; Vitalij Rapoport Haraszti, Miklós  207 Harms, Daniil  120, 122, 130–2 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Rowling)  50 Harzem, Thomas  286 Hašek, Jaroslav  26–7 Hauptmann, Gerhart  43, 104 Havel, Václav  26, 83, 319 Hawkesworth, Celia  128, 129n27, 134n36 Heaney, Seamus  284

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  81, 106, 113, 223–4 hegemony  1–2, 5, 11, 35–6, 142, 156, 235–48 Heidegger, Martin  81, 85–6 Heine, Heinrich  43, 161 Hemingway, Ernest  192, 210 Henderson the Rain King (Bellow)  303 Hermans, Theo  1, 152, 300 Hesiod  46 Himalayas  97, 99 Hirschfeld, Magnus  139 Hitler, Adolf  139 Hölderlin, Friedrich  57n3 Holland  10 Hollywood and translation  235– 48, 9–11, 235–48, 286, 312 See Goblin Holmes, James  2, 93n1 Holocaust  294 Homer  38, 43, 61, 66, 70–1, 105, 290–1 Homoseksualnost (Homosexuality) (Podlesnik)  139 Horace  38, 45, 105 Hosking, Geoffrey  7 Hugo, Victor  43 Hulak-Artemovs’kyi, Petro  38 Humboldt, Alexander von  105 Humboldt, Wilhelm von  57n3, 60 Hungarian Revolution (1956)  24 Hungary  11, 19–20, 206–16 See Austro-Hungarian Empire Hungarian translation of Latin American literature  11, 205–16 and anthologies  212–13 and censorship  207–8 and classics  209–11 and Cuban authors  210 and linguistic taboos  214–15 and literarization  209, 212∂14, 216 and peripheral literatures  206–7 uniformity of style in  205–6, 216 Huntington, Samuel  24 Husak, Gustav  317 Huxley, Auldous  270n9 Ibsen, Henrik  102, 104, 108

I identity Asian  1 authorial  57, 59, 61, 63, 75, 81, 92, 106, 122, 130–1, 133–4, 243–4 Central European  19–23, 26–7 Eastern European  2, 6, 9–11, 33–4 European  28 national identity  4, 7–9, 13, 26–7, 32–5, 37–8, 49, 75, 93, 101, 235, 247, 278, 281–2, 296 and Otherness  223–9, 231 Russian  7, 10–11, 246 sexual  137, 141–3 translator  236, 238, 240–1 Ukrainian  33–4, 37 Western  1–2, 4 The Iliad (Homer)  43, 61, 66 imitation  4, 56, 63, 66, 68–70, 100–1, 131, 161n28, 176, 181n5, 281, 288, 297–8, 313 Immortality (Kundera)  321–2 imperialism  2, 6–9, 11, 20, 26, 33–5, 39–44, 79, 87, 98, 138, 140, 151, 155, 168, 220–1, 224, 226–7, 246, 314, 320 See Austro-Hungarian empire; Ottoman empire; Russian empire International English  12 India, and translation  10, 97–113 See Konstantin Bal’mont Indologists  106–7, 111 International Pen Conference (Ljubljana) (2006)  7 International Renaissance Foundation (Soros)  50 Internationalism or Russification? (Dziuba)  48 Inventing Eastern Europe (1994) (Wolff)  2–3 Iphigènie (1674) (Racine)  277, 287–8, 290–3 The Invisible Man (Wells)  83 Ionescu, Eugen  82 Ionescu, Nae  82–3 Iraq war (2003–present)  289–92 Islam  26, 225–6, 229 Islamic extremism  226 Italian language  119–20 Ivanov, Georgii  155



Index  J Jakobson, Roman  5, 11, 171–85, 184n6, 266 aesthetic position  177–81 biographical information  172–3 and McCarthyism  184n6 political subtext  181–5 theoretical position  174–7 Jena romantics  57 Jewish people  3, 12, 20, 25, 123n8, 124, 126n15, 139, 294, 296 The Joke (1967) (Kundera)  21, 29, 317–19, 322 K Kafka, Franz  19, 26–7 Kalidasa  97, 100, 102, 104–5, 107–12 See Dobytaia muzhestvom Urvasi; Maliavika i Agnimitra; Sakuntala Kalinin, Mikhail  159 Kamernyi Teatr  97–8, 109–10 Kanikova, S. I.  2, 7–8 Kant, Immanuel  85 Kantor, Tadeusz  287 Karamzin, Nikolay  58, 65, 103, 105–7 Katan, Edmund  303 Katenin, Pavel  55, 62–5 Katranov, Nikola  224–5 Kazakhstan  26, 156–7, 161n27 Kennan, George  3 Kérel, Francois  319–20 Khlebnikov, Velimir  179, 190n11 “A Kidnapped West” (essay) (Granta) (Kundera)  21–2, 27–8 Kim, Anatolii  51 Kiš, Danilo  20, 117–18, 123–7, 130, 133 Kiukhel’beker, Vil’gel’m  68 Knight in Panther’s Skin (Rustaveli)  46, 100 Kochanowski, Jan  277–94 See Dismissing the Greek Envoys Kochur, Hryhorii  34 Kogan, Feiga  12 Kolomiiets’, Lada  48–9 Konrád, Gyoárgyi  20 Konwicki, Tadeusz  51 Korais, Adamantois  221

Kornilov, Vladimir  198–9 Koršunova, Nadežda  255 Kosik, Karel  319 Kostioukovitch, Elena  302 Kotliarevs’kyi, Ivan  37–8 Kott, Jan  283 Královédvorsky Manuscript  39 Kroneberg, Andrej  250–1, 258 Kryms’kyi, Ahatanhel  43 Kulish, Panteleimon  41 Kulle, Victor  189 Kundera, Milan  2–4, 6, 10, 12, 19–30, 317–322 and borders  19–22, 29–30 “Centro-Eurocentrism” of  22–6 and Central Europe  10, 19–30 and “others”  22–6 personal dictionary of  320 publication history of “Kidnapped”  21–2 small nations and “culture”  26–8 translation as theme in  317–22 See The Art of the Novel ; The Curtain; The Joke; “A Kidnapped West”; Laughable Loves; “Un Occident kidnappé”; Testaments Betrayed; “The Tragedy of Central Europe”; The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kuznetsov, Pavel Nikolaevich  160–1, 160n26, 166 L Lainé, Pascal  26–7 Last Action Hero (McTiernan)  238 Latin American literature translation  11, 206–16 Latvia  295–314 national identity  296–7 20th century ethnic changes in  296 Latvian translation  295–314 and globalization  298–300 historical background of  295–7 and Latvian language  297–8

linguistic impact of  307–14 and “loans”  308–10 and norms  300–4, 310–14 phrase level and grammar  307–8 and original writing  304–7 and texts  304 Laughable Loves (1970) (Kundera)  22, 317, 319 The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, See Slovo o polku igoreve Le Débat  320 Le Théâtre Indien (1890) (Lévi)  107 League for the Protection of Human Rights (Romania)  84 Leihm, Antonin  318 Lenin, Vladimir  9, 158–9 Lenore (1773) (Bürger)  55, 62, 67, 69 Lermontov, Mikhail  122, 176–7, 179, 200, 222, 222n2 Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699) (Fénelon)  66 lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgendered (LGBT) cultural context of  138–40 Lesbian culture  142–4 and queer strategies  140–2 translation  137–45 translator as author  144 Levansky, Vladimir  150 Lévi, Sylvain  107, 111 Levi-Strauss, Claude  173 Levin, Iurii  61, 62n12 Levin, Phillis  143 Levy, Jiři  5, 60, 61n10,11, 62, 62n13, 64 Lewis, Cecil Day  79, 82–3, 88–94 Lezbična zgodba (Tratnik)  139 LGBT, See lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgendered Liiceanu, Gabriel  80, 86 “Literary Reveries” (1834) (Belinskii)  55 Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History (Friedberg)  34 The Life of Buddha (Ashvaghosha)  100, 107 Life is a Dream (La vida es sueno) (Calderón)  103 Life is Elsewhere (1973) (Kundera)  317

 Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts The Life and Work of the Composer Foltyn (1938) (Čapek)  321 Lithuania  8n3, 25–6, 65n18, 100, 135, 189, 192, 281, 301–3 “Liudmila” (Zhukovskii)  62–3, 65n18 Lolita (Nabokov)  171, 173–4, 184 Lomonosov, Mikhailo  63–4, 71 Look at the Harlequins (Nabokov)  180 Lord Byron, See Byron, Lord The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)  241–5, 247 Losev, Lev  187, 188, 196n16 Lovinescu, Monica  82–3 Lowell, Robert  197 The Lower Depths (Gor’kii)  109 Lozinskij, Michail  251, 258–9, 262 Lubiewo (Witkowskiś)  51 Lukash, Mykola  34, 46, 48–9 Lupa, Krystian  287 M Macedonia  117n1, 119, 135, 141 Madame Bovary (Flaubert)  48 Maeterlinck, Maurice  100, 102, 104, 108 Majakovskij, Vladimir  120, 120n6, 121–3, 132, 177–8 Maliavika i Agnimitra (Malavika and Agnimitra) (Kalidasa)  107, 109 Mama Cash Cultuurfonds (The Netherlands)  145 The Man without Qualities (Musil)  26–7, 287 Mandelshtam, Osip  99, 120 Markov, Vladimir  99, 107, 118 Marx, Karl  43, 81 Marxism  9, 43, 81, 209, 230, 283 Masaryk, Tomáš  321 Mascagni, Pietro  43 Maupassant, Guy  43, 46 “May” (Smith)  144 May, Rachel  6 Mayakovsky, Vladimir  173, 191 Mazon, André  181 McGann, Jerome  219 McTiernan, John  238 Meirkhol’hold, Vsevolod  98 “Memo to the One Above” (Noica)  87

Merezhkovskii, D. S. (1886–1941)  98 Mickiewicz, Adam  38–9, 42, 45, 282–4, 287 Mikhalev, Aleksei Mikhailovich  237 Miłosz, Czesław  20, 23 A Minor Apocalypse (Konwicki)  51 Misery (King)  301n3 Mongols  3 Montenegro  118 Moscow Art Theater  101, 110 Moscow 2042 (1987) (Voinovich)  265, 270–4 Mother (Ogrky)  46 Mouston, Wendy  82–3 Mukařovsky, Vilem  173 Musiał, Magdalena  286 Muslims  3, 7, 12, 223n3, 225–6 Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (The Museum of Unconditional Surrender) (Ugrešić)  134 Mysyk, Vasyl’  46, 49 N Nabokov, Vladimir  5, 11, 29, 171–85, 190 aesthetic position of  177–81 and Alice in Wonderland  180 biographical information  172–3 and Eugene Onegin  172, 174, 176–7, 180–1 political subtext  181–5 and Slovo o polku igoreve  171– 2, 174–6, 179, 181–2 theoretical position  174–7 See The Gift; Lolita narodnost’ (“nationality”)  55, 68–9, 72–4, 156, 156n14 national identity  4, 7–9, 13, 26–7, 32–5, 37–8, 49, 75, 93, 101, 235, 247, 278, 281–2, 296 Nazi Germany  20, 139, 151, 294, 295 Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Interculture in Hispanic History (2000) (Pym)  2 neoclassical/neoclassicist translation  41, 44, 59, 287 Neumann, Iver  22 Neruda, Pablo  206, 210–12 New Drama (Russian)  101–2

New York Review of Books  22, 28, 190n11 Newmark, Peter  174 Nietzsche, Friedrich  103–4, 229–30, 282, 282n5, 287 Noica, Constantin  10, 79–94 biography of  82–3 and Ceaușescu  79–82, 84, 94 and Cecil Day Lewis  79, 82–3, 88–94 early period of (1934–50)  85 Romania as “Europe’s translator”  79–94 and Romanian fiddlering  84 and spirituality  81 translations, See Sagittarius Rising North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)  28 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg)  62, 63n15, 70n24 Novogodnee “Новогоднее” (New Year’s Greeting) (Cvetaeva)  128 Novšak, France  139 Noyes, George R.  283n6 Nule i ništice (Nulls and Nothings) (Harms)  130–1 Nyugat magazine  206 O Oblaka v shtanakh (“Облако в штанах”) (A Cloud in Trousers) (Majakovskij)  121, 177 Occident  3, 21–2, 28, 83–4, 227 “Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale,” (Kundera)  21–2, 28 “Ode to Joy” (1785) (Schiller)  58 Odyssey (Homer)  43, 67, 70–72 Oertringen, Van  139 Ol’denburg, Sergei  111 “Ol’ga,” (Katenin)  62 On Racine (Barthes)  288 “On Translations in General and in Particular on Translations of Verse” (1810) (Zhukovskii)  61 Opium Wars  35 Orest, Mykhailo  47 Oresteia (Xenakis)  294



Index  Orient  113, 151, 157, 166, 172–3, 223–5, 227 Orientalism  43, 106, 111, 139, 163, 166 Orientation towards the Same Sex (Van Oertringen)  139 Ortiz, Fernando  211 Orwell, George  189, 189n6, 269–72, 291 Othello (Shakespeare)  41, 103, 253 “Otherness”  56–9, 62n12, 76, 133, 223–9, 231 and Central Europe  22–6 and Hegel  223–4 and Russian nationalism  56– 7, 57n3 and translation  56 and Turgenev  58 Ottoman Empire  3, 82, 87, 220–1, 224–7, 231 P Pale Fire (Nabokov)  180 Pan Tadeusz (Mickiewicz)  45 Parry, William  221–2 Pasternak, Boris  51, 124–7, 151, 157n15, 165–7, 167n36, 251, 253–4, 257–8, 260–2 Penev, Boyan  221 Perepadia, Anatol’  48 Perevodchik (translator)  106–7 Persian poets  43, 49 Peškov, Igor  258–61 Peter the Great  4–5, 154 Pfeiffer, Peter C.  8 Phanariots  82 Phèdre (Racine)  287–9, 291–2 Philippi, Paul  87 Pick, Otto  6 Pidmohyl’nyi, Valeriian  45–6 Pijade, David S.  139 Plato  38, 80–1 Plutarch  284 Podlesnik, Ivan  139 podstrochniki  149–50, 153, 161–2 Poe, Edgar Allen  99–100 Poland  19–20, 24, 27, 45, 224, 277–94 Polevoi, Boris  69 Polevoj, Nikolaj  250–1 Poliarnaia zvezda  68 Polish-Jewish  294

Polish language  37–8, 41, 43, 51, 100, 141, 181, 184, 187, 189–92, 194, 198, 277–94, 301 and cultural exceptionalism  283 “the Polish question”  11, 277–8, 286–7 Polish theater  277–94 and classical tragedy  280–3 and cultural politics of translations  283–5 and Kochanowski  277–94 and Zadara  277–94 See Greek drama Polish uprising (1863)  41 Poltava (Pushkin)  39, 45 Poplavskij, Vitalij  254 Popol Vuh  97, 100 Popovič, Anton  5 Prague  19, 21, 24–7, 81, 124 Pravda newspaper  152, 156, 159–61, 166, 167n36 The Prisoner of Chillon (Byron)  68 “The Problem of Speech Genres” (1953/54) (Bakhtin)  152–3, 152n8 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus)  49 Pym, Anthony  2 Pynset, Robert B.  2, 7–8 Puchkov, Dmitry Iur’evich, See Goblin Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich  38–40, 43, 45–6, 56, 65, 68, 72–5, 99, 113–14, 120, 155, 158n15, 175–7, 179–81, 183, 200, 222, 224, 224n4, 241 and Zhukovskii  56, 65, 68, 72–5 See Boris Godunov; Eugene Onegin; Poltava Putiata, Aleksei  106–7 R Racine, Jean  277–9, 281, 284, 286–93 See Iphigènie; Phèdre Radio Free Europe  83 Rapoport, Vitalij  253–4 Rej, Mikołaj  285–7 Remenyik, Zsigmond  206 Revolver magazine  140

Rilke, Rainer Maria  46, 49, 51, 128–30 Roma (of Eastern Europe)  12–13 Romania  10, 24–5, 30, 79–94, 224 as Europe’s “translator”  10, 79–94 fiddlering  84 and Paris diaspora  80–4, 93–4 and pre-communism  85, 88, 93 See Constantin Noica; Phanariots On Romantic Poetry (1823) (Somov)  72–3 Romanticism  4, 40, 55–7, 59–62, 65–70, 72, 72n26, 74–5, 80, 85, 102, 104–5, 122, 124, 139, 158, 211, 219–22, 227, 229, 231, 250, 281–3, 285, 287 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)  51 Rossini, Gioachino  46 Rostand, Edmond  43 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  4–5 Rowling, J.K.  50 Rudnistky, Konstantin  101 Rudy, Stephen  184n6 Russia as “barbaric”  23, 112, 273 as “culture of translation”  10 and identity  6, 7, 10–11, 223–9, 231 the “other” Europe  2 relationship to Western Europe  24 and Slavic nations  117–18 Russian Academy of Sciences  4, 41, 111 Russian Empire  39–40, 43–4 Russian Federation  235–6 Russian Formalism  45, 178n4, 183 Russian hexameter  55–6, 66–7, 69, 71 Russian literature  55–7, 60–5, 68–9, 71–6, 117, 119–20, 133, 133n4, 179, 183, 200, 244 “battle of the ballads” (1816)  55 competitive aspect of translation in  62 first literary competition  63 and the French  56–7

 Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts and narodnost’  55, 68–9, 72–4 and romanticism  55, 60–2, 68 status of  119–20, 133n4 Russian nationalism  55–76 and the foreign  56–60, 64–5, 72, 75 and Russian hexameter  55–6, 66–7, 69, 71 See Vasilii Zhukovskii Russian New Drama  101–2 Russian orientalists  106, 111 Russian Revolution (1905)  101 Russian Revolution (1917)  44, 101, 155 Russian Silver Age/fin-desiècle  97–113 Russian Symbolists  97–102, 111–12 Russian translation and the Cold War  11, 171–85 See Roman Jakobson; Vladimir Nabokov and dystopia, See dystopia and Russian nationalism See Russian nationalism in Soviet Russia, See Joseph Brodsky post-war Yugoslavia  119–35 See Danilo Kiš; Dubravka Ugrešić; Irena Vrkljan Rustaveli, Shota  46 Ryl’s’kyi, Maksym  44 S Sabashnikov, Mikhail  100, 101n1, 107–8, 111 Sagittarius Rising (Lewis)  79, 82, 88–94 Sakuntala (Kalidasa)  10, 97–113 and Bal’mont  107–13 in Europe and Russia  104–7 and European drama  101–4 and the foreign  99–101 and Perevodchik  106–7 plot of  110 and Russian theater (1914)  97–8 Sales, Joan  36 Salomé (Wilde)  100, 110 Schäffner, Christina  300 Schama, Simon  10 Schiller, Friedrich  58, 61, 69, 72–4, 282

Schlegel, August Wilhelm  57, 62, 63n15, 105–6 Schlegel, Friedrich  70n24 Schulz, Bruno  27 Selected Passages (Gogol)  57 Serbia  7, 118–19, 133–4, 224 Serbian language  7, 42, 100, 117–35, 138, 141, 301 Serbo-Croatian language  7, 138, 189, 198 Serbs  138, 140, 184 Sergeev, Andrei  195–6 Sever, Josip  121–3, 132–3, 135 sexual identity and translation  137–45 queer strategies  140–2 translating Lesbian culture  142–4 translator as author  144 Shakespeare, William  10–11, 36, 38, 40–3, 47–9, 51, 59, 62, 70, 72–4, 81, 102–4, 249–62, 282–3 See The Comedy of Errors; Hamlet; Othello; Romeo and Juliet; Troilus and Cressida Shakhmatov, A.A.  173 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  45, 99, 103, 108–9 Shevchenko, Taras  37, 39–40 Shishkov, Alexander  65 Shostakovich, Dmitrii  154 Si j’ose dire (If I Dare to Say) (Lainé)  26 Silver Age/fin-de-siècle (Russian)  97–113 Simeoni, Daniel  300 Škuc, Društvo  140–1 ŠKUC-Lambda  140–1, 144–5 Skujenieks, Knuts  301 Skvorecky, Josef  319 Slavejkov, Petko  222n2 Slavic nations  117–18 The Sleepwalkers (Broch)  26 Slonim, Marc  266 Slovaks  24–5, 47, 222 Slovenia  7, 10, 25, 119n5, 137–45 Slovenia, and translation of sexual identity  137–45 cultural context of  138–40 Lesbian culture  142–4 queer strategies  140–2 translator as author  144

Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Lay of Igor’s Campaign)  5, 171–2, 174–6, 179, 181–2, 255 Słowacki, Juliusz  283–6 Slutsky, Boris  188 “small” nations  2, 7, 19–21, 25–6, 28, 30, 79–80 Šmejkalová-Strickland, Jiřina  10 Smetana, Bedrich  43 Smith, Ali  144 The Social Contract (Rousseau)  4 Socialist Realism  46, 119, 121, 152, 156, 165, 207, 318 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander  267–8, 270–2 Some Like It Hot (Wilder)  286 Somlyó, György  206 Somov, Orest  72 The Song of Igor’s Campaign, See Slovo o polku igoreve Sophocles  43, 49 Soros, George  50 The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) (Goethe)  58 Sotola, Jiři  319 Soviet translation and the Cold War  171–85 as culture planning  154–5, 157, 164–5, 167 and Hollywood  235–48 and “intuitive translation”  160–3 and narodnost’  156 and podstrochniki  149–50, 153, 161–2 and politics  149–68, 187–202 projects and practices of  154–9 the space in between  163–7 and totalitarianism  149–54 and Western hegemony  235– 48 and World Literature  155 See Dzhambul Dzhabaev Spanish Golden Age  102–3 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  1, 34 Stal’skii, Suleiman  156–7, 162, 167n36 Stalin, Joseph  6, 9, 12, 38, 44–6, 118, 120–2, 149–52, 155–9, 162n29, 163, 166–8, 166n34,35, 167n36, 267, 279n2, 296, 317 Stanislavsky, Konstantin  101, 110



Index  Stary Teatr in Kraków  277, 285, 288n12, 289n13, 290n15 Štoll, Pavel  303 Stolojan, Sanda  84, 94 Stone Butch Blues (Feinberg)  141, 143–5 Strast (Passion) (Pijade)  139 Strikha, Maksym  33–4 Struggle for Independence (1917–1920) (Ukraine)  44 Sturm und Drang  58 Stus, Vasyl’  49 Sumarokov, Aleksandr  63–4 “Surveys” (Bestuzhev)  68 Svevo, Italo  26 Svidzins’kyi, Volodymyr  46 Svitlychnyi, Ivan  49 Swedish language  21, 29, 189, 301 Symbolists (Russian)  97–102, 111–12 Szeftel, Marc  181 Szondi, Peter  101 T Tairov, Aleksandr  97–8, 100, 109–10 Tarantino, Quentin  242–3, 289 Tarkovskii, Arsenii  149–51, 157, 162n29, 188n3 Tarlovskii, Mark Arievich  161–3, 161n28, 162n29 Ten, Borys  46, 49 Teoriia i praktyka perekladu (Theory and practice of translation) (Finkel)  45 Testaments Betrayed (1995) (Kundera)  29 Theater of Youth and Beauty (Teatr Iunosti i Krasoty)  102–4, 109–10 Three Russian Poets: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev (1944) (Nabokov)  177, 179 Tilemakhida (1766) (Trediakovskii)  66–7, 66n19, 71 Tillberga, Karīna  303 Todorov, Tsvetan  173 Todorova, Maria  1, 3, 23, 223, 227 Tolkien, J. R. R.  241 Tolstoy, Leo  43, 267, 272 Toporova, Zinaida  193 totalitarianism  149–54 Toury, Gideon  5, 35, 149, 154, 156–7, 160, 163, 298, 300–1, 303, 305, 314

“The Tragedy of Central Europe” (Kundera)  22–3, 26–30 translation and belatedness  3–6 and Bulgaria  219–31 and censorship  187–202 central role of  5 and the Cold War  171–85 creative aspect of  55–76 cultures of  1–13 and dystopia  265–74 and empire  6–9 Europe’s translator  79–94 and the foreign  56–7 of Greek drama in Poland  277–94 and Hollywood blockbusters  235–48 and India  97–113 and Latvian language  295–314 and mediation  56, 65–6, 113, 153, 225 and post-war Hungary  206–16 of prose versus verse  61 and Russian dystopia  265–74 and Russian nationalism  55–76 in Russian Silver Age/ fin-desiècle  97–113 and sexual identity  137–45 and Shakespeare  249–62 and Soviet politics  149–68, 187–202 statistics on  4 styles  41–2, 44–5, 48 and totalitarianism  149–68 Ukranian  33–51 under communism  9–10 uses of  10–13 Translation and Identity in the Americas (2008) (Gentzler)  2 Translation in a Postcolonial Context (1999) (Tymoczko)  2 Translation Studies Reader (Venuti)  172 Translation and Terminology Centre (TTC)  304 translator identity  236, 238, 240–1 Traviata (Verdi)  43 Trediakovskii, Vasilii  63–4, 66, 67, 69, 71 Tri Rastsveta (Three Blossomings) (1907) (Bal’mont)  102

Trinaesti apostol (The Thirteenth Apostle) (Majakovskij)  121–2 Triolet, Elsa  318 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare)  41, 48 Trubar, Primož  138 Trubetskoi, Nikolai  105–6 Tsvetaeva, Marina  99, 124n12, 190, 201 Turgenev, Andrei (1781–1803)  55, 58–9, 77, 263 Tuwim, Julian  47 Tykocin (Demirski and Zadara)  293–4 Tymoczko, Maria  2, 12 U Ugrešić, Dubravka  118, 122, 130–3 Ukrainian Literary Translation: Between Literature and Nation-Making (Strikha)  34 Ukrainian translation  33–51 “affirmative action empire”  44 and audience  35, 38–9, 42, 46, 50–1 and the Beat generation  51 and the Bible  37, 40–1 and colonialism  33–4, 38–9, 51 and Communist Party  47–8 and contexts  33–7 and the Diaspora  47 and Ems Edict  40–2 experimental translation  48 and foreign films and TV  50 and the Futurists  47 Gulag  44–7, 49 and homosexuality  51 leading authors of  33 and literacy  38 and Modernists  43, 46, 51 and national identity  10, 33–5, 37, 48–9 Neoclassicists  44 post-Soviet  50–1 pre-Soviet  37–44 schools of  41–2, 44–5, 48 Soviet  44–9 Struggle for Independence  44 and Writer’s Union  47–8 See Yuri Andrukhovych; Andrii Bondar; Volodymyr Dibrova; Oksana Zabuzhko

 Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)  19–21, 29, 319–20 Undina (Tchaikovsky)  67–9 Uricaru, Ioana  8n4 Uvarov, Sergei  66–7, 67n20, 71 V Valuev Circular (1863)  40–1 Vargas Llosa, Mario  211–12 Velvet Revolution (1989)  29 Venevitinov, Dmitrii  69 Venuti, Lawrence  4, 8, 22, 35–6, 38, 172, 205, 262, 269n7, 305, 314 Verdery, Katherine  81–2, 85 Verdi, Giuseppe  43, 46 Vestnik Evropy (Zhukovskii)  59 Vigdorova, Frida  193 Vinitskii, Il’ia  58–9, 71, 75, 77 Virgil  37–8, 45, 66, 105, 284 Voinovich, Vladimir  265, 270–4 Volkov, Solomon  154 von Rezzori, Gregor  3, 6 Vostokov, Aleksandr  67 Vrkhlitskii, Iaroslav  100 Vrkljan, Irena  128–30 Vrončenko, Mikhail  250 Vsesvit (Universe) (journal)  49–50 Vysotskii, Vladimir  245 W Wakabayashi, Judy  1–2 Warsaw Pact  25, 119, 134–5, 279, 317 We (1921) (Zamiatin)  265–70, 266n2,3, 274

Wells, H. G.  83, 209 “West-Best, East-Beast” (1997) (Davies)  4 White, Edmund  22 Whitman, Walt  49, 100 Wilbur, Richard  197 Wilde, Oscar  100, 110, 139 Wilder, Billy  286n10 Wilson, Edmund  172, 182 Winterson, Jeanette  144 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy  26 Witkowskiś, Michal  51 Women and Lovers (2007) (Katan)  303 Woods, Michelle  21 World War I  43, 88, 118, 138, 282 World War II  47, 79–80, 82, 118, 138, 140, 171, 207, 229, 279n2, 285–6, 290, 290n15, 294, 306, 318 WR: Misterije organizma (WR: Mysteries of the Organism) (Makavejev)  118 Written on the Body (Winterson)  144 Wyspiański, Stanisąaw  281–4, 282n5, 286–7 Xenakis, Iannis  294 Yugoslavia  3, 7, 10, 25, 30, 117–35, 138–40, 194, 286 and books of literary translation  119 cultural identity  7 homosexual culture in  138–40 and post-war avant garde poetry  119–35

and Russian language and culture  117 and Slovenia, See Slovenia Soviet reputation in  118–19 See Danilo Kiš; Josip Sever; Dubravka Ugrešić; Irena Vrkljan Z Zabolotskii, Nikolai  151 Zabuzhko, Oksana  33 Zadara, Michał  277–94, 286n10 biography of  284–5 and German theater  286–7 Zamiatin, Evgenii  265–71, 274 Zerov, Mykola  44–5 Zhovtis, Aleksandr  157, 160–1, 164 Zhukovskii, Vasilii  55–76 and classicisim  55, 59–66, 64n16, 69–70, 74–5 creative methods of  57–8 formation of translation of  58–62 and Friendly Literary Society  55, 58 and Gogol  70–4 and the “Other”  56, 57n3, 58–9, 62, 76 and Pushkin  56, 65, 68, 72–5 reception of translations of  62–70 and romanticism  55–7, 59–62, 61n10, 62n12,13, 65–70, 72, 72n26, 74–5 Zilboorg, Grigory  267–9 Zola, Gianfranco  43 Zorin Andrei L.  58, 58n5, 77

Benjamins Translation Library A complete list of titles in this series can be found on www.benjamins.com 94 ALVSTAD, Cecilia, Adelina HILD and Elisabet TISELIUS (eds.): Methods and Strategies of Process Research. Integrative approaches in Translation studies. Expected August 2011 93 JONES, Francis R.: Poetry Translating as Expert Action. Processes, priorities and networks. xv, 214 pp. + index. Expected July 2011 92 ROBINSON, Douglas: Translation and the Problem of Sway. xiv, 222 pp. + index. Expected June 2011 91 MESCHONNIC, Henri: Ethics and Politics of Translating. Translated and edited by Pier-Pascale Boulanger. vi, 173 pp. + index. [EST Subseries 6] Expected June 2011 90 MAHER, Brigid: Recreation and Style. Translating humorous literature in Italian and English. ix, 185 pp. + index. Expected June 2011 89 BAER, Brian James (ed.): Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts. Literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia. 2011. xii, 332 pp. 88 GILE, Daniel, Gyde HANSEN and Nike K. POKORN (eds.): Why Translation Studies Matters. 2010. xi, 269 pp. [EST Subseries 5] 87 HALE, Sandra Beatriz, Uldis OZOLINS and Ludmila STERN (eds.): The Critical Link 5. Quality in interpreting – a shared responsibility. 2009. vii, 255 pp. 86 WAKABAYASHI, Judy and Rita KOTHARI (eds.): Decentering Translation Studies. India and beyond. 2009. xi, 219 pp. 85 BRAGA RIERA, Jorge: Classical Spanish Drama in Restoration English (1660–1700). 2009. xv, 330 pp. 84 MONACELLI, Claudia: Self-Preservation in Simultaneous Interpreting. Surviving the role. 2009. xxi, 182 pp. 83 TORIKAI, Kumiko: Voices of the Invisible Presence. Diplomatic interpreters in post-World War II Japan. 2009. x, 197 pp. 82 BEEBY, Allison, Patricia RODRÍGUEZ INÉS and Pilar SÁNCHEZ-GIJÓN (eds.): Corpus Use and Translating. Corpus use for learning to translate and learning corpus use to translate. 2009. x, 151 pp. 81 MILTON, John and Paul BANDIA (eds.): Agents of Translation. 2009. vi, 337 pp. 80 HANSEN, Gyde, Andrew CHESTERMAN and Heidrun GERZYMISCH-ARBOGAST (eds.): Efforts and Models in Interpreting and Translation Research. A tribute to Daniel Gile. 2009. ix, 302 pp. 79 YUSTE RODRIGO, Elia (ed.): Topics in Language Resources for Translation and Localisation. 2008. xii, 220 pp. 78 CHIARO, Delia, Christine HEISS and Chiara BUCARIA (eds.): Between Text and Image. Updating research in screen translation. 2008. x, 292 pp. 77 DÍAZ CINTAS, Jorge (ed.): The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation. 2008. xii, 263 pp. (incl. CD-Rom). 76 VALERO-GARCÉS, Carmen and Anne MARTIN (eds.): Crossing Borders in Community Interpreting. Definitions and dilemmas. 2008. xii, 291 pp. 75 PYM, Anthony, Miriam SHLESINGER and Daniel SIMEONI (eds.): Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies. Investigations in homage to Gideon Toury. 2008. xii, 417 pp. 74 WOLF, Michaela and Alexandra FUKARI (eds.): Constructing a Sociology of Translation. 2007. vi, 226 pp. 73 GOUADEC, Daniel: Translation as a Profession. 2007. xx, 409 pp. 72 GAMBIER, Yves, Miriam SHLESINGER and Radegundis STOLZE (eds.): Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies. Selected contributions from the EST Congress, Lisbon 2004. 2007. xii, 362 pp. [EST Subseries 4] 71 ST-PIERRE, Paul and Prafulla C. KAR (eds.): In Translation – Reflections, Refractions, Transformations. 2007. xvi, 313 pp. 70 WADENSJÖ, Cecilia, Birgitta ENGLUND DIMITROVA and Anna-Lena NILSSON (eds.): The Critical Link 4. Professionalisation of interpreting in the community. Selected papers from the 4th International Conference on Interpreting in Legal, Health and Social Service Settings, Stockholm, Sweden, 20-23 May 2004. 2007. x, 314 pp. 69 DELABASTITA, Dirk, Lieven D’HULST and Reine MEYLAERTS (eds.): Functional Approaches to Culture and Translation. Selected papers by José Lambert. 2006. xxviii, 226 pp. 68 DUARTE, João Ferreira, Alexandra ASSIS ROSA and Teresa SERUYA (eds.): Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines. 2006. vi, 207 pp.

67 PYM, Anthony, Miriam SHLESINGER and Zuzana JETTMAROVÁ (eds.): Sociocultural Aspects of Translating and Interpreting. 2006. viii, 255 pp. 66 SNELL-HORNBY, Mary: The Turns of Translation Studies. New paradigms or shifting viewpoints? 2006. xi, 205 pp. 65 DOHERTY, Monika: Structural Propensities. Translating nominal word groups from English into German. 2006. xxii, 196 pp. 64 ENGLUND DIMITROVA, Birgitta: Expertise and Explicitation in the Translation Process. 2005. xx, 295 pp. 63 JANZEN, Terry (ed.): Topics in Signed Language Interpreting. Theory and practice. 2005. xii, 362 pp. 62 POKORN, Nike K.: Challenging the Traditional Axioms. Translation into a non-mother tongue. 2005. xii, 166 pp. [EST Subseries 3] 61 HUNG, Eva (ed.): Translation and Cultural Change. Studies in history, norms and image-projection. 2005. xvi, 195 pp. 60 TENNENT, Martha (ed.): Training for the New Millennium. Pedagogies for translation and interpreting. 2005. xxvi, 276 pp. 59 MALMKJAER, Kirsten (ed.): Translation in Undergraduate Degree Programmes. 2004. vi, 202 pp. 58 BRANCHADELL, Albert and Lovell Margaret WEST (eds.): Less Translated Languages. 2005. viii, 416 pp. 57 CHERNOV, Ghelly V.: Inference and Anticipation in Simultaneous Interpreting. A probability-prediction model. Edited with a critical foreword by Robin Setton and Adelina Hild. 2004. xxx, 268 pp. [EST Subseries 2] 56 ORERO, Pilar (ed.): Topics in Audiovisual Translation. 2004. xiv, 227 pp. 55 ANGELELLI, Claudia V.: Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role. A study of conference, court, and medical interpreters in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. 2004. xvi, 127 pp. 54 GONZÁLEZ DAVIES, Maria: Multiple Voices in the Translation Classroom. Activities, tasks and projects. 2004. x, 262 pp. 53 DIRIKER, Ebru: De-/Re-Contextualizing Conference Interpreting. Interpreters in the Ivory Tower? 2004. x, 223 pp. 52 HALE, Sandra Beatriz: The Discourse of Court Interpreting. Discourse practices of the law, the witness and the interpreter. 2004. xviii, 267 pp. 51 CHAN, Leo Tak-hung: Twentieth-Century Chinese Translation Theory. Modes, issues and debates. 2004. xvi, 277 pp. 50 HANSEN, Gyde, Kirsten MALMKJAER and Daniel GILE (eds.): Claims, Changes and Challenges in Translation Studies. Selected contributions from the EST Congress, Copenhagen 2001. 2004. xiv, 320 pp. [EST Subseries 1] 49 PYM, Anthony: The Moving Text. Localization, translation, and distribution. 2004. xviii, 223 pp. 48 MAURANEN, Anna and Pekka KUJAMÄKI (eds.): Translation Universals. Do they exist? 2004. vi, 224 pp. 47 SAWYER, David B.: Fundamental Aspects of Interpreter Education. Curriculum and Assessment. 2004. xviii, 312 pp. 46 BRUNETTE, Louise, Georges L. BASTIN, Isabelle HEMLIN and Heather CLARKE (eds.): The Critical Link 3. Interpreters in the Community. Selected papers from the Third International Conference on Interpreting in Legal, Health and Social Service Settings, Montréal, Quebec, Canada 22–26 May 2001. 2003. xii, 359 pp. 45 ALVES, Fabio (ed.): Triangulating Translation. Perspectives in process oriented research. 2003. x, 165 pp. 44 SINGERMAN, Robert: Jewish Translation History. A bibliography of bibliographies and studies. With an introductory essay by Gideon Toury. 2002. xxxvi, 420 pp. 43 GARZONE, Giuliana and Maurizio VIEZZI (eds.): Interpreting in the 21st Century. Challenges and opportunities. 2002. x, 337 pp. 42 HUNG, Eva (ed.): Teaching Translation and Interpreting 4. Building bridges. 2002. xii, 243 pp. 41 NIDA, Eugene A.: Contexts in Translating. 2002. x, 127 pp. 40 ENGLUND DIMITROVA, Birgitta and Kenneth HYLTENSTAM (eds.): Language Processing and Simultaneous Interpreting. Interdisciplinary perspectives. 2000. xvi, 164 pp. 39 CHESTERMAN, Andrew, Natividad GALLARDO SAN SALVADOR and Yves GAMBIER (eds.): Translation in Context. Selected papers from the EST Congress, Granada 1998. 2000. x, 393 pp. 38 SCHÄFFNER, Christina and Beverly ADAB (eds.): Developing Translation Competence. 2000. xvi, 244 pp.

37 TIRKKONEN-CONDIT, Sonja and Riitta JÄÄSKELÄINEN (eds.): Tapping and Mapping the Processes of Translation and Interpreting. Outlooks on empirical research. 2000. x, 176 pp. 36 SCHMID, Monika S.: Translating the Elusive. Marked word order and subjectivity in English-German translation. 1999. xii, 174 pp. 35 SOMERS, Harold (ed.): Computers and Translation. A translator's guide. 2003. xvi, 351 pp. 34 GAMBIER, Yves and Henrik GOTTLIEB (eds.): (Multi) Media Translation. Concepts, practices, and research. 2001. xx, 300 pp. 33 GILE, Daniel, Helle V. DAM, Friedel DUBSLAFF, Bodil MARTINSEN and Anne SCHJOLDAGER (eds.): Getting Started in Interpreting Research. Methodological reflections, personal accounts and advice for beginners. 2001. xiv, 255 pp. 32 BEEBY, Allison, Doris ENSINGER and Marisa PRESAS (eds.): Investigating Translation. Selected papers from the 4th International Congress on Translation, Barcelona, 1998. 2000. xiv, 296 pp. 31 ROBERTS, Roda P., Silvana E. CARR, Diana ABRAHAM and Aideen DUFOUR (eds.): The Critical Link 2: Interpreters in the Community. Selected papers from the Second International Conference on Interpreting in legal, health and social service settings, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 19–23 May 1998. 2000. vii, 316 pp. 30 DOLLERUP, Cay: Tales and Translation. The Grimm Tales from Pan-Germanic narratives to shared international fairytales. 1999. xiv, 384 pp. 29 WILSS, Wolfram: Translation and Interpreting in the 20th Century. Focus on German. 1999. xiii, 256 pp. 28 SETTON, Robin: Simultaneous Interpretation. A cognitive-pragmatic analysis. 1999. xv, 397 pp. 27 BEYLARD-OZEROFF, Ann, Jana KRÁLOVÁ and Barbara MOSER-MERCER (eds.): Translators' Strategies and Creativity. Selected Papers from the 9th International Conference on Translation and Interpreting, Prague, September 1995. In honor of Jiří Levý and Anton Popovič. 1998. xiv, 230 pp. 26 TROSBORG, Anna (ed.): Text Typology and Translation. 1997. xvi, 342 pp. 25 POLLARD, David E. (ed.): Translation and Creation. Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918. 1998. vi, 336 pp. 24 ORERO, Pilar and Juan C. SAGER (eds.): The Translator's Dialogue. Giovanni Pontiero. 1997. xiv, 252 pp. 23 GAMBIER, Yves, Daniel GILE and Christopher TAYLOR (eds.): Conference Interpreting: Current Trends in Research. Proceedings of the International Conference on Interpreting: What do we know and how? 1997. iv, 246 pp. 22 CHESTERMAN, Andrew: Memes of Translation. The spread of ideas in translation theory. 1997. vii, 219 pp. 21 BUSH, Peter and Kirsten MALMKJAER (eds.): Rimbaud's Rainbow. Literary translation in higher education. 1998. x, 200 pp. 20 SNELL-HORNBY, Mary, Zuzana JETTMAROVÁ and Klaus KAINDL (eds.): Translation as Intercultural Communication. Selected papers from the EST Congress, Prague 1995. 1997. x, 354 pp. 19 CARR, Silvana E., Roda P. ROBERTS, Aideen DUFOUR and Dini STEYN (eds.): The Critical Link: Interpreters in the Community. Papers from the 1st international conference on interpreting in legal, health and social service settings, Geneva Park, Canada, 1–4 June 1995. 1997. viii, 322 pp. 18 SOMERS, Harold (ed.): Terminology, LSP and Translation. Studies in language engineering in honour of Juan C. Sager. 1996. xii, 250 pp. 17 POYATOS, Fernando (ed.): Nonverbal Communication and Translation. New perspectives and challenges in literature, interpretation and the media. 1997. xii, 361 pp. 16 DOLLERUP, Cay and Vibeke APPEL (eds.): Teaching Translation and Interpreting 3. New Horizons. Papers from the Third Language International Conference, Elsinore, Denmark, 1995. 1996. viii, 338 pp. 15 WILSS, Wolfram: Knowledge and Skills in Translator Behavior. 1996. xiii, 259 pp. 14 MELBY, Alan K. and Terry WARNER: The Possibility of Language. A discussion of the nature of language, with implications for human and machine translation. 1995. xxvi, 276 pp. 13 DELISLE, Jean and Judith WOODSWORTH (eds.): Translators through History. 1995. xvi, 346 pp. 12 BERGENHOLTZ, Henning and Sven TARP (eds.): Manual of Specialised Lexicography. The preparation of specialised dictionaries. 1995. 256 pp. 11 VINAY, Jean-Paul and Jean DARBELNET: Comparative Stylistics of French and English. A methodology for translation. Translated and edited by Juan C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel. 1995. xx, 359 pp. 10 KUSSMAUL, Paul: Training the Translator. 1995. x, 178 pp. 9 REY, Alain: Essays on Terminology. Translated by Juan C. Sager. With an introduction by Bruno de Bessé. 1995. xiv, 223 pp.

8 (1st) GILE, Daniel: Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training. 1995. xvi, 278 pp. 8 GILE, Daniel: Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training. <STRONG>Revised edition. 2009. xv, 283 pp. 7 BEAUGRANDE, Robert de, Abdullah SHUNNAQ and Mohamed Helmy HELIEL (eds.): Language, Discourse and Translation in the West and Middle East. 1994. xii, 256 pp. 6 EDWARDS, Alicia B.: The Practice of Court Interpreting. 1995. xiii, 192 pp. 5 DOLLERUP, Cay and Annette LINDEGAARD (eds.): Teaching Translation and Interpreting 2. Insights, aims and visions. Papers from the Second Language International Conference Elsinore, 1993. 1994. viii, 358 pp. Toury TOURY, Gideon: Descriptive Translation Studies – and beyond. <STRONG>Revised edition. Expected Forthcoming 4 TOURY, Gideon: Descriptive Translation Studies – and beyond. 1995. viii, 311 pp. 3 LAMBERT, Sylvie and Barbara MOSER-MERCER (eds.): Bridging the Gap. Empirical research in simultaneous interpretation. 1994. 362 pp. 2 SNELL-HORNBY, Mary, Franz PÖCHHACKER and Klaus KAINDL (eds.): Translation Studies: An Interdiscipline. Selected papers from the Translation Studies Congress, Vienna, 1992. 1994. xii, 438 pp. 1 SAGER, Juan C.: Language Engineering and Translation. Consequences of automation. 1994. xx, 345 pp.