Contexts, subtexts and pretexts : literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia

348 Pages·2011·2.157 MB·English

by  Brian James Baer

Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts
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General Editor Associate Editor Honorary Editor
Yves Gambier Miriam Shlesinger Gideon Toury
University of Turku Bar-Ilan University Israel Tel Aviv University
Advisory Board
Rosemary Arrojo Zuzana Jettmarová Rosa Rabadán
Binghamton University Charles University of Prague University of León
Michael Cronin Werner Koller Sherry Simon
Dublin City University Bergen University Concordia University
Daniel Gile Alet Kruger Mary Snell-Hornby
Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne UNISA, South Africa University of Vienna
Nouvelle
José Lambert Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit
Ulrich Heid Catholic University of Leuven University of Joensuu
University of Stuttgart
John Milton Maria Tymoczko
Amparo Hurtado Albir University of São Paulo University of Massachusetts
Universitat Autónoma de Amherst
Franz Pöchhacker
Barcelona
University of Vienna Lawrence Venuti
W. John Hutchins Temple University
Anthony Pym
University of East Anglia
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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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.
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Table of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on contributors ix
Introduction: Cultures of translation 1
Brian James Baer
part i. Contexts
Shifting contexts: The boundaries of Milan Kundera’s Central Europe 19
Charles Sabatos
Nation and translation: Literary translation and the shaping
of modern Ukrainian culture 33
Vitaly Chernetsky
Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation 55
David L. Cooper
Romania as Europe’s translator: Translation in Constantin Noica’s
national imagination 79
Sean Cotter
Translating India, constructing self: Konstantin Bal’mont’s India
as image and ideal in Fin-de-siècle Russia 97
Susmita Sundaram
The water of life: Resuscitating Russian avant-garde
authors in Croatian and Serbian translations 117
Sibelan Forrester
Translation trouble: Translating sexual identity into Slovenian 137
Suzana Tratnik
 Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts
part ii. Subtexts
Between the lines: Totalitarianism and translation in the USSR 149
Susanna Witt
Translation theory and cold war politics: Roman Jakobson
and Vladimir Nabokov in 1950s America 171
Brian James Baer
The poetics and politics of Joseph Brodsky as a Russian poet-translator 187
Yasha Klots
Squandered opportunities: On the uniformity of literary
translations in postwar Hungary 205
László Scholz
Meaningful absences: Byron in Bulgarian 219
Vitana Kostadinova
part iii. Pretexts
Translated by Goblin: Global challenge and local response
in Post-Soviet translations of Hollywood films 235
Vlad Strukov
“No text is an island”: Translating Hamlet in twenty-first-century Russia 249
Aleksei Semenenko

Russian dystopia in exile: Translating Zamiatin and Voinovich 265
Natalia Olshanskaya
Between cosmopolitanism and hermeticism: Translating classical
tragedy into Polish theater 277
Allen J. Kuharski
The other polysystem: The impact of translation on language
norms and conventions in Latvia 295
Gunta Ločmele and Andrejs Veisbergs
Translation as condition and theme in Milan Kundera’s novels 317
Jan Rubeš
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: Re-
Thinking 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 Globaliza-
tion (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2007) and a co-editor of Crossing Centuries
(2000), a comprehensive anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in English trans-
lation, 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 Uni-
versity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches Czech and Russian languages
and literatures. He is author of the monograph Creating the Nation: Identity and Aesthet-
ics in Nineteenth-Century Rus sia 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 na-
tional movements.
Sean Cotter is Associate Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at The Univer-
sity 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 Roma-
nian 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
 Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts
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 Depart-
ment 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 Gom-
browicz 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 pub-
lished approximately 60 research works since 1987, and these deal mainly with the
language of advertising, translation and interpreting, the Latvian language, and lan-
guage 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 contempo-
rary 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 Univer-
sity 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 vol-
umes. 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 transla-
tion 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.