Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2016

Scholars and philosophers often turn to metaphors when discussing translation. While metaphors serve as tools to define the complex nature of this process, they can also offer unexpected insights into a specific cultural epoch, revealing implicit ideological biases and covert assumptions. In this article, I explore the use of metaphors in the programmatic statements of the Soviet Literary Translation School, as well as in several poems from the 1930s–1960s devoted to translation. The article outlines the dominant thematic groups of metaphors in connection with the ideological context, and compares them with more personal responses by several poet-translators, including Arsenii Tarkovskii, Boris Slutskii, and Vera Zviagintseva. The analysis suggests that while Soviet critical discourse on translation reflected the underlying ideological assumptions (such as the reception of the cultural “other,” or the views on creativity and artistic norms), the use of metaphors allowed poets and scholars to express conflicting opinions and voice artistic dissent.

Acknowledging the significance of context and of translators as agents, this article is concerned with the establishment of ‘translational facts’ (Toury 1995) and its relation to canon formation in Russian culture of the Soviet period. The translational facts examined are the two complete renditions of Byron’s Don Juan to appear during the Soviet era: Georgii Shengeli’s version from 1947 and Tatiana Gnedich’s from 1959. The context in which they are considered is the development of the so-called Soviet school of translation as a concept, a process which roughly coincided with the intervening period. Drawing on Russian archival sources, the study offers a reconsideration of the ‘Soviet school of translation’ from perspectives beyond its own self-understanding and official status and looks at it as a construct with a complex history of its own. The analysis shows how translational facts may become signs in the target culture and how this, in the case of Byron, affected the formation of the Soviet translational canon.

This article examines strategies implemented by Russian translators of Shakespeare’s sonnets 135 and 136 when dealing with puns on the word “will” in various senses. Seven translations spanning the period from 1880 to 2011 have been selected for analysis. These renderings of Shakespearian puns exhibit a wide range of translation strategies and various effects within the target texts. The analysis demonstrates that the majority of the selected translations reflect social taboos and censorship with regard to sexuality in Russian translated literature. However, two recent translations containing sexual allusions indicate changing norms in the post-Soviet period. Thus, translations of sexual puns may also be illustrative of the ways in which the target language’s norms influence the translators’ choices.

The first Russian translation of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) was produced in 1960 by Rita Rait-Kovaleva, a renowned translator of contemporary Western literature (English, French, German) in the Soviet Union. This essay examines Rait’s translation of The Catcher in the Rye in the context of the problem of censorship and translation, focusing on several instances of Rait’s translation of profanities and sex-related passages of The Catcher in the Rye. It demonstrates how the creative strategies of the translator not only helped her overcome censorship barriers but also transformed a foreign text into a new cultural model.

This article addresses the relationship between text and paratext in the publication history of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Such paratexts include Nabokov’s own afterword to the 1958 American edition and his postscript (published in 1967) to his own translation of Lolita into Russian, as well as various introductions and afterwords, both in English-language editions and in translations of Lolita into Russian and other languages. A particularly interesting type of paratext is constituted by annotations to the main text, and the analysis focuses on parallel examples published in annotated editions of Lolita in English, Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian, and French. The analysis shows that the most detailed annotations concerning the totality of the English and Russian Lolita text and paratexts can be found in editions published in languages other than English and Russian, whereas most English or Russian editions seem to focus on the respective language version. There is still no complete, annotated edition of the bilingual text containing all the authorial paratexts.

This article examines strategies applied in selected passages of Elena Petrova’s Russian translation of Olga Grushin’s anglophone novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2005). The novel is set in Moscow during the late Soviet period and depicts a crisis precipitated by the changes brought by glasnost in the life of a loyal apparatchik. Although the Russian-American writer Grushin composed the novel in her adopted language of English, it reflects a Russian cultural subtext and contains numerous Russian linguistic elements and cultural allusions. It is therefore interesting to analyze how these elements are rendered in the Russian translation, entitled Zhizn’ Sukhanova v snovideniiakh (2011). The analysis is followed by a consideration of challenges posed by translingual texts to theoretical understandings of translation. It argues that established concepts within translation studies, such as domestication, foreignization, source language and target language, are not well-suited to cases of literary translingualism.