Translation in Russian Contexts: Transcultural, Translingual and Transdisciplinary Points of Departure

An International Conference on Slavic and Translation Studies

Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University

3-7 June 2014

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Brian James Baer Kent State University, Ohio

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, Ohio, and a member of the University’s Institute for Applied Linguistics. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and general editor of the Kent State Scholarly Monograph Series in Translation Studies. He is author of the monograph Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association in 2011. His most recent publications include the edited volumes Contexts, Subtexts, Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (Benjamins 2011), No Good without Reward: The Selected Writings of Liubov Krichevskaya (University of Toronto 2011), Russian Writers on Translation: An Anthology (St. Jerome 2013) and a translation of Juri Lotman’s final book-length work, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (University of Tallinn 2013). Professor Baer is co- editor, with Claudia Angelelli, of Research Methods in Translation and Interpreting Studies, forthcoming from Routledge, and is currently completing a book-length project entitled Reading Between: Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature.

Keynote address: The Translator’s Biography: Translation, Authorship and the Making of Soviet Subjects

Alexandra Borisenko Moscow State University

Alexandra Borisenko is Associate Professor at the Department of Philology at Moscow State University. Author of numerous critical and theoretical works on literary history and literary translation, she has also translated many works of British and American literature into Russian, most recently Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (jointly with Victor Sonkin). While her earlier work was devoted to issues of literary translation and the “Soviet translation school,” she has later specialized in the detective genre and the Russian reception of nonsense literature. Since 1997, she has, together with Dr. Sonkin, taught a workshop on literary translation. The workshop has resulted in the publication of several books translated by students, including two major anthologies of British and American crime fiction (2009, 2011). Professor Borisenko also teaches a course in theoretical aspects of translation.

Keynote address: “The Good Are Always the Merry”: British Children’s Literature in Soviet Russia

—1— Katerina Clark Yale University

Katerina Clark is Professor of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where she is also a member of the Senior Committee for Film Studies Program. Author of the pioneering study The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (1981; third edition, Indiana University Press 2000), Professor Clark has written extensively on topics of Russian-Soviet culture. Her book Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Harvard University Press 1995) was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize for the best book of 1995 in Russian, East European or Eurasian Studies. Professor Clark’s latest book, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Harvard University Press 2011), highlights the significance of translation during the peak of Soviet internationalism in the 1930s and the concept of world literature à la Russe as it developed throughout this decade. She also co-authored, with Evgeny Dobrenko, the annotated volume Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (Yale University Press 2007). Her monograph Mikhail Bakhtin, co-authored with Michael Holquist (Harvard University Press 1984), has been translated into a range of languages, including Japanese, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese.

Keynote address: Translation and Transnationalism

Harsha Ram University of California at Berkeley

Harsha Ram is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published extensively on eighteenth-century Russian literature, Russian romanticism and modernism, focusing primarily on the relationship between cultural and political history and the evolution of lyric poetry. His first book, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (University of Wisconsin Press 2003) examines the sublime as a rhetorical category mediating between the imperial state and the development of lyric form and subjectivity. He is currently completing a book entitled Crossroads Modernity: Aesthetic Modernism and the Russian-Georgian Encounter, on the dialogue between Russian and Georgian modernism around the time of the Russian revolution.

Keynote address: Translating Romanticism in the Age of Bardic Nationalism: Zhukovskii, Pushkin and Grigol Orbeliani

—2— Maria Tymoczko University of Massachusetts

Maria Tymoczko is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her publications include Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (1999) and Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (2007), with Neuroscience and Translation forthcoming. She is editor (with Edwin Gentzler) of Translation and Power (2002) and of Translation, Resistance, Activism (2010). Her articles have appeared in many of the leading journals in Translation Studies and in many anthologies. She currently focuses on theoretical issues about translation and on the ethics and ideology of translation. She has lectured around the world.

Keynote address: Integrating Russian Traditions into Translation Studies: Considerations Related to Theory

Adrian J. Wanner Pennsylvania State University

Adrian Wanner is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. Born in Switzerland, he studied French and Russian Philology in Zurich, Paris and Leningrad, and obtained his PhD in Russian Literature from Columbia University in 1992. He has taught at Penn State since 1996. His research interests include the Russian Silver Age, literary relations between Russia and Western Europe, the translation of poetry, utopian studies and genre studies. More recently, he has focused on contemporary diaspora fiction, especially the literature written by Russian-Jewish émigré authors in French, German, English and Hebrew. He has published numerous articles in Slavic and comparative literature journals and is the author of three monographs: Baudelaire in Russia (University Press of Florida 1996), Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (Northwestern University Press 2003), and Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Northwestern University Press 2011). In addition, he has published six editions of Russian, Romanian and Ukrainian poetry in his own German verse translation. His most recent book, published in 2013, is a bilingual Russian-German edition of the poetry of Vladislav Khodasevich.

Keynote address: Beyond Nabokov and Brodsky: Russian Self-Translation in the 21st Century

—3— PAPER ABSTRACTS

Per Ambrosiani

Translating the Incomprehensible: Anthony Burgess’ Nadsat Vocabulary in Translation

Abstract The Russian-based “nadsat” slang vocabulary used by the main character and narrator of Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange presents both a theoretical and practical challenge for translation studies: how can more or less incomprehensible source text lexical items be translated into a target text? And in which ways do translations of A Clockwork Orange recreate the literary effects of the “nadsat” vocabulary of the source text? Starting from the traditional foreignization/domestication dichotomy and developing it into a more complex analytical tool, the paper explores the different strategies used by translators of Burgess’ text to recreate the clash between the comprehensible and incomprehensible that is one of the main characteristics of the original text, at least for monolingual readers of the English text who lack knowledge of Russian or other Slavic languages. The analysis focuses on the translation of this linguistically heterogeneous text into Russian, comparing ways of recreating the comprehensibility/incomprehensibility interplay present in the source text. The Russian target texts include translations of A Clockwork Orange by Evgenij Sinel´shchikov and Vladimir Boshniak, both published in 1991, and discusses them in a wider context of translations into other European languages (French, German, Italian, Swedish, etc.).

Biography Per Ambrosiani, Professor of Russian at Umeå University, earned his Ph.D. in Slavic languages at Stockholm University in 1992. His main scholarly interests include the linguistic analysis of Slavic manuscripts and early printed books, historical Slavic lexicology, and Slavic onomastics, but Ambrosiani has also published articles within translation studies, where he has tried to problematize the traditional domestication/foreignization dichotomy. Selected publications and conference presentations are available at https://umu.academia.edu/PerAmbrosiani. [email protected]

—4— Alexandra Berlina

Ostranenie and the Surreal in Translation

Abstract We know about the difficulties of translating realia. But what about surrealia? How do elements of surreal estrangement travel in translation? Are translators tempted to mute or exaggerate them? How does the target readers’ different cultural background interplay with “surreality”? My paper will deal with translations both from and into Russian: Andrew Bromfield’s versions of Viktor Pelevin’s early short stories, the Russian version of Olga Grushin’s The Dream Life of Sukhanov and Joseph Brodsky’s self-translations. Apart from these interpretations of doubly alien (foreign and estranged) texts, we will look at ostranenie itself: how does Shklovsky’s term fare in translation?

Biography Alexandra Berlina was born in Moscow in 1984. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from the University College London (with distinction) and a Magister title in American, English and German studies from the University of Düsseldorf (1,1). She received her PhD (summa cum laude) in American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, where she proceeds to teach and research. She also works as a freelance translator and interpreter, and translates poetry for pleasure. Her monograph Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation appeared in 2014. She lives in Düsseldorf with her husband and two children. You can find a detailed CV with publications at www.uni-due.de/amerikanistik/Berlina_Alexandra.shtml. [email protected], [email protected]

—5— Marijeta Bozovic

Nabokov’s “Translations” and Canon Formation

Abstract The library of scholarship on Vladimir Nabokov still circles uncomfortably around his annotated translation Eugene Onegin (1964) and late English-language novel Ada, or Ardor (1969). I examine the cultural ‘translation’ that Nabokov attempts to perform in his two most controversial monuments, annexing what he feared was a vanishing Russian tradition to that of the English-language modernist novel. Nabokov aimed not only to enter, but to define an international canon of literary masterpieces— against that of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics—and with Russian literature as a central rather than marginal strain. I turn to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, John Guillory, and Pascale Casanova to read Nabokov’s transcultural experiments in light of sociologies of literature. Ada proves a veritable allegory of cultural capital, of centers and peripheries: planet Antiterra, Nabokov’s personal ‘world republic of letters,’ transplants and conflates his beloved literatures. To create this culturally interpenetrating Russo-Franco- Anglophone world, Ada lifts lines, characters, and fabula from Pushkin but also from Byron and Chateaubriand. A pattern emerges of great English, French, and Russian triads; it repeats more faintly with Dickens, Flaubert, and Tolstoy; but the most fraught iteration is Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov himself. Through creative output and a life-long aesthetic propaganda campaign, Nabokov conjured for many readers an alluring vision of a transcultural Antiterra. I argue that it is precisely this emancipatory potential that in turn captured the imagination of such writers as J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi, and W. G. Sebald—all, in some sense, outsiders to dominant centers of cultural capital, and all ‘Nabokov’s children.’

Biography A specialist in Russian and Balkan modernism, I completed my Ph.D. in Russian Literature at Columbia University in 2011. After two years at Colgate University as an Assistant Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies, I joined the Yale Slavic Department in 2013. This talk is part of my first book project, From Onegin to Ada: Nabokov’s Canon, which examines canon formation, transcultural literatures, and struggles with other media. My current research turns to contemporary political engaged poetry in Moscow and St. Petersburg. That new project is entitled Avant- Garde Post– : Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union.

Marijeta Bozovic, Assistant Professor Yale University, Slavic Languages and Literatures [email protected], +1 917 887 5197

—6— Alexander Burak

Translating Whole-Text Realia: Film Titles, Bumper Stickers and Voiceover Dubs

Abstract A “whole-text realium” is the unique overall culture-specific imprint made by a verbal product on the mind of its consumer. I will consider three types of such whole-text realia: film titles, bumper stickers, and voice characteristics in film voiceover translations. Such whole-text realia – or voices, in the sense of distinctive styles or manners of expression – make it necessary for the translator to perceive a discursive event (a film narrative, the “personal résumé” of a bumper sticker, or the distinctive qualities and prosody of a film character’s voice) as a whole and to reinvent and re- express it in the receiving culture in the form of a translation that would, ideally, resonate with, or, at least, hint at the nature of the cultural product in the source culture. I will briefly discuss a few translations of film titles, one or two possible ways of translating some bumper stickers, and the presentation of voiceover film translations as illustrations of a translator’s unique cross-cultural creativity.

Biography Alexander Burak is Assistant Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA. He is a graduate of the Translators’ and Interpreter’s Department of the “Maurice Thorez Institute” in Moscow (currently named the Moscow Linguistic University). He has a Ph.D. in sociology from Moscow State University. He is the author of three previous books – Translating Culture 1: Words (Moscow: R.Valent, 2010); Translating Culture 2: Sentence and Paragraph Semantics (Moscow: R.Valent, 2013); and “The Other” in Translation: A Case for Comparative Translation Studies (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica, 2013) – as well as numerous other publications on translation. [email protected]

—7— Vitaly Chernetsky

Mogutin Translating/Translating Mogutin: Literary Translation, Minority Discourses and Cultural Transformation

Abstract In the world of contemporary Russian culture, Yaroslav (Slava) Mogutin (b. 1974) stands out for several reasons. Publishing prolifically since the age of 17, he quickly established the reputation of a leading, if controversial, representative of “new Russian journalism” and also began publishing original poetry and fiction and preparing editions of previously banned authors and texts. Mogutin emerged as the first Russian public figure who was out as gay since the beginning of his career, and his sexuality became a major factor informing his creative work. Mogutin’s activity as a cultural producer ended up provoking hostile reactions from the Russian authorities; in 1995 he became the first Russian to be granted asylum in the US on the grounds of persecution due to sexual orientation. In the US, his voice as an original poet and prose writer, as well as literary translator, continued maturing, and in 2000 he won the Andrei Bely Prize, one of Russia’s most prestigious literary awards. Within Mogutin professional activities, literary translation of provocative and challenging works by major gay literary figures occupies a prominent place. This paper analyzes the practices of Mogutin as a literary translator, his choices and strategies in rendering these new types of literary discourse into Russian, and also looks at the experience and strategies of translators who have been rendering Mogutin’s Russian-language writings into other languages, including self-translations and translations in collaboration with the author, highlighting and elucidating the role of translation in his creative activity and its sociocultural impact.

Biography Vitaly Chernetsky is an Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. He is the author of the monograph Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007) and of numerous articles and essays on Russian and Ukrainian literature and film, as well as translation studies. He co-edited the anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (2000) and the annotated Ukrainian-language edition of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (2009). Among his translations are two novels by one of Ukraine’s leading contemporary writers, Yuri Andrukhovych: The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (forthcoming). [email protected]

—8— David L. Cooper

Authenticity, Translation and Mystification in Pushkin’s “Pesni zapadnykh slavian”

Abstract This paper will examine Pushkin’s translation of Prosper Mérimée‘s La Guzla and his additions from the folk poetry collected and published by Vuk Karadžić in comparison with other Romantic folklore translations (Zhukovsky and Katenin) and translation-forgeries (Macpherson’s Ossian, the Czech forged manuscripts). It will investigate the affinity between translation and mystification in Russia and more broadly examine the particular inclination to forge authentic national literary values and monuments through the techniques of translation and mystification.

Biography David L. Cooper is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center there. His 2010 monograph, Creating the Nation: Identity and Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-century Russia and Bohemia, investigated the programmatic rethinking of literary values around the emerging concept of the nation and the multiples roles translation played in that process. His current research examines literary forgery in its relationship to national culture through the case of the Czech forged manuscripts. [email protected]

—9— Olga Demidova

Russian 18th-Century Women Translators and the History of Russian Female Writing

Abstract The paper deals with the phenomenon of Russian cultural history that has not so far been the subject of any extensive analytical study, notwithstanding the fact that the names of women translators are well represented in ‘The Dictionary of Russian 18th Century Literature’. Translation is treated as one of the very few (in many cases – the only) means for women to be admitted to the all-male world of Russian 18th century literature and thus get the possibility to devote themselves to at least some literary activity and/or further on to creative writing per se. The author argues that the very decision to turn to translation was in the majority of cases both caused and sponsored either by a male relative belonging to the world of letters or by some person influential enough in social and artistic hierarchy. Special attention is paid to the mechanisms of the works translated by women getting published and reviewed, as well as to various perspectives of reviews written mostly by men writers and critics. Other important problems touched upon in the paper are those of the attitude of women translations themselves to their activity as reflected in numerous ‘explanatory forewords’ and prefaces; the choice of foreign texts (from the point of view of their language, genre, plot, characters, moral, etc.); last but not least, the type of translation chosen (complete, abridged, adapted for various types of the reading public, etc.) and the part translation played in the translator’s literary activity in general. Besides, the paper offers a possible status typology within the circle of women translators regarding it in the perspective of future female creative writing.

Biography Leningrad State Pushkin University, Professor (Philosophy Department); European University in St. Petersburg, Professor (MARCA International program). Fields of interest: philosophy, literature (Russian, Western, and comparative), Russian émigré culture, gender studies, history of translation. Since 1991 up to the present time has held more than 30 Russian and foreign research, conference participation, and publishing grants (RGNF, IREX, Fulbright, Fulbright-Kennan, Open Society Institute, to mention just a few); presented papers, did research and lectured in the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia. Author of more than 200 works (books, articles, publications and commentaries of archival materials) in the said fields. Professional translator from English and Polish; member of St. Petersburg and Russian Writers’ Unions. Member of Professional Women’s Advisory Board (since 2004). [email protected]

—10— Sara Feldman

Limitations and Possibilities of Translation Theory in the Russian Context

Abstract This paper addresses the uses and limitations of current translation theory for conceptualizing domesticating translations as literary enrichment in the Russian translation zone. The field of postcolonial translation studies is based on an imperial model that does not account well for the Russian Empire. The paper argues that this model is particularly inadequate to explain the case of Jews under Russian imperial rule in the Pale of Settlement, who were neither foreign nor indigenous in the colonized regions of the former Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. When Russified Jewish intellectuals translated Russian literature into Hebrew and Yiddish, despite the accessibility of Russian texts within their language polysystem, their aim was to expand the literary capacity of Jewish languages. The paper shows how the process of translation by Jewish writers resembles the process of translating French works into Russian by and for French-speaking Russians. Because the audience has access to the original text, these translations are distinct from the “smooth” or “fluent” domesticating ones which scholars have criticized for erasing difference. An ethics of fidelity in translation or preservation of difference does not apply to these situations, in which an “unfaithful” translation cannot conceal the original text. The paper demonstrates that ideas of Slavophilia and Westernization have informed Russian- Jewish translation practices and argues that they can also enrich current translation theory.

Biography Sara Feldman recently completed her doctorate in Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, entitled “Fine Lines: Hebrew and Yiddish Translations of Alexander Pushkin’s Verse Novel Eugene Onegin, 1899-1937,” explores the use of translated Russian literature for the development of modern East European Jewish culture. [email protected]

—11— Sibelan Forrester

Whose Foreign Is Foreign? Domestication, Foreignization and Contesting Formal Norms (in Translating Russian Poetry into English)

Abstract In recent years, the growth of Translation Studies has offered practicing translators new vocabulary to understand what they are doing – whether they use theory and its terms to justify their intuitive decisions or to provoke new kinds of translation choices. Some translators have mapped the terms domestication and foreignization onto the reproduction (or not) of metrical and rhyming patterns from Russian originals in English translations, and the choices from English literary models of register and genre deployed in these translations. Russian and English share some but not all prosodic features; this makes metrical equivalence at once possible and challenging. These traditions have influenced each other at different times, perhaps especially during the Cold War. This paper will concentrate on recent translations of Russian poetry into English by a variety of translators, including non-native speakers of English, with regard to translation theories from Russian and Western European or North American sources. It will devote particular attention to translators’ statements about their approaches, as well as the ways they formulate the importance of Russian poetry to Anglophone readers and various Anglophone poetic traditions (especially North American, British, and Irish), and will compare these statements to discussions of formal (metered) and free (unmetered) verse in Anglophone poetry.

Biography Sibelan Forrester is Professor of Russian at Swarthmore College. Her research interests include women’s and gender studies, Russian poetry (especially the Silver Age), translation theory and practice, and science fiction. She has published translations from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, including poetry by Aleksandr Galich, Marianna Geide, Anna Gorenko, Elena Ignatova, Yulia Neyman, Dmitri Prigov, Anna Russ, Maria Stepanova, and Marina Tsvetaeva. [email protected]

—12— Inés García de la Puente

The Memory of Self-Translation

Abstract Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiographies are outstanding examples of his habit to translate his own work: shortly after publishing his memoirs Conclusive Evidence (1951) in English, he wrote Drugie Berega (1954) in Russian; two decades later, his re-auto- translated autobiography Speak Memory (1967) appeared. The three memoirs differ in numerous passages due to additions, omissions and recreations. If, as scholarship has already noted, Nabokov’s principles of translation differed from those of self- translation, the ways in which he carried out the self-translation of his fiction also differed from the ways in which he translated his autobiographies. This paper proposes to consider the creative genius, the craft of translation and the role of language in recalling memories as the three pillars on which the auto- translation of the self – that is, of the autobiographical experience – rests. It will reach its conclusions by combining comparative textual analysis and the results of recent sociolinguistic studies focused on Russian-English bilinguals.

Biography Inés García de la Puente received a PhD in Slavic Philology and Indo-European Linguistics in 2006. She went on to conduct research on cultural exchange and trade routes in Rus’ at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and at Harvard University. She is currently an Instructor and Research Associate at the University of St. Gallen. Her second post-doctoral project brings together her interest in Russian and Spanish philology from a cultural perspective: It studies the literary works of translingual exiled and immigrant writers in the United States who have used English, Russian and Spanish as the vehicle to recount their migrating experiences. [email protected]

—13— Anna Giust

Translation as Appropriation in the 18th-Century Russian Operatic Repertoire

Abstract Before the evolution of an original production, the appropriation of European literary models in Russia passed through translation, which became a mean of appropriation of foreign repertoire and its transformation into a national one. Early translations were characterized by the author’s freedom to introduce new elements or changes. In the 18th century, the practice of remakes with sklonenie na russkie nravy aimed at a profound comprehension of the work by the audience, translators being conscious of the different cultural ground in which their texts were supposed to be received. This process affected opera, too. In this field the creation of an original repertoire passed through the transformation of performances created outside the Russian Empire, where they were not either known until an advanced step of their evolution. During the 18th century, the practice of peredelka was applied to librettos in the most appreciated genre of comedy, in performances that shared patterns with both literature and music dramaturgy. Compared to other literary genres, operatic librettos of this age are more open to changes introduced by translators. At the same time, their translation is made complex by the need of fitting words to the metrics of music. My paper will focus on the practice of staging operas in Russian translation, which supported the creation of Russian opera komicheskaya.

Biography Anna Giust is lecturer of Russian at University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. She holds a PhD in History and Criticism of visual and performing arts, obtained at University of Padua with the thesis Towards Russian Opera: Growing National Consciousness in 18th- Century Operatic Repertoire (2012). Her previous educational history includes a master degree in Musicology at University Ca’ Foscari of Venice (2008) and a master degree in Russian Language and Literature at University of Venice (2004). She is the author of several articles concerning Russian music theatre from the 18th up to the 20th centuries. [email protected]

—14— Helena Goscilo

The Politics of Translation: Status and Market

Abstract Focused on translation in America, my polemical examination of trends and tribulations over the last 40-odd years assesses the roles of countries’ international status, accessibility of language, authors’ (political and/or economic) significance at home and abroad, translators’ functions and qualifications , publishers’ priorities in the politics of translation, and reviews. Who translates which authors, and why? Which presses publish translations, and what dictates their choices? What is the role of academia in this multi-stage process? What qualifies as a successful translation? Does the quality of a translation influence sales of the book? Most illustrations of arguments in the talk draw on translations from Russian, with several references to Polish and other Slavic languages. Specific cases include A. Solzhenitsyn, M. Kharitonov, T. Tolstaia, L. Ulitskaia, B. Akunin, and M. Shishkin.

Biography Helena Goscilo is Professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. Her most recent publications include Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film (2010), Reflections and Refractions: The Mirror in Russian Culture (2011), Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic (2011), Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon (2012) and Embracing Arms: Cultural Representations of Slavic and Balkan Women in War (2012), and Lives in Transit: Contemporary Russian Women's Writing (2013). [email protected]

—15— Karin Grelz

Translation Practice and War Politics: Nabokov in 1940s America

Abstract As he fled from Paris to the US in 1940, Vladimir Nabokov faced the reality of an America that had joined forces with the Soviet Union in the war against Germany. Asked to translate the literature of an allied country and to tune down his critique against the Soviet Union, he found himself in the same situation as many of his Soviet writer-colleagues. From this perspective, his book Nikolai Gogol can be read as a statement on translation and transculturality in an era of wartime patriotism that prefigures Nabokov’s controversy with Roman Jakobson over the translation of Slovo o polku Igoreve. In line with this, the paper discusses the meaning of Nabokov’s apparent laying bare of the devices of his translation practice. In his discussion of the untranslatability of the Russian concept of poshlost, he refers to Pushkin’s excuse in Eugene Onegin for not finding in Russian an exact counterpart for the word “vulgar.” He thus appears to ridicule the idea of national particularism and the concept of untranslatability as an outcome of this. Still, Edmund Wilson found Nikolai Gogol explanatory of the enigma of Russian culture and the exposition of poshlost “perfect and valuable.” Does Wilson’s reading maybe present an intentional fallacy?

Biography Karin Grelz, PhD, researcher at the Department of Slavic Langugages and Literatures, Stockholm University, specialized in Marina Tsvetaeva and Lydia Ginzburg, translator of Ginzburg’s notes from the Siege, and up to recently senior lecturer at the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University. [email protected]

—16—

Gasan Gusejnov

Translation and Echolalia: A Professional Predilection for Foreign Words

Abstract In this paper, I shall consider cases where a translator has retained particular words from the original in the translated text, despite the existence of an adequate translation for these terms. The motives for such choices can be manifold. In the paper, I want to demonstrate cases where the retention of the original satisfies a translator’s inexplicit and often secret desire to carry over some element of the original sound into the language of destination similarly to the way a jeweller would besetting a precious stone. My case studies are some aspects of the translating practice of two philosophers – Viacheslav Ivanov and Alexei Losev. Such a practice of translation retains traces of the old Greco-Roman tradition of translatio, whereby the transference of Greek terms into Roman habitus occurs through the acculturation of the Greek (or Etruscan) word without literal translation into Latin (historia-histrio- ἱστορία).

Professor at the Faculties of Philology and Media Higher School of Economics, Moscow [email protected]

—17— Julie Hansen

Literary Translingualism and Translation: Some Theoretical Considerations

Abstract This paper considers some theoretical challenges posed by recent translingual literature written by Russian authors. Literary translingualism is defined by Steven Kellman in The Translingual Imagination (2000) as writing in multiple languages or a language that is not native to the author. This phenomenon is of course not new, but an increasing number of Russian authors now write and publish fiction in non-native languages such as English, French, German, Hebrew and Swedish. This new generation of translingual Russian writers transcends traditional linguistic and cultural boundaries through the form and content of their literary works, which frequently mix languages, cultural allusions and literary traditions. It is therefore interesting to examine strategies employed in the translation of such works into Russian. Specific challenges presented by translingual texts to the practice and theory of translation will be exemplified by selected passages of Elena Petrova’s Russian translation of Olga Grushin’s anglophone novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006), entitled Zhizn’ Sukhanova v snovideniiakh (2011). The paper argues that literary translingualism calls into question established concepts within translation theory such as domestication and foreignization, as well as a largely binary view of translation that views source language and target language as stable categories.

Biography Julie Hansen is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at the Department of Modern Languages and Research Fellow at the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has published articles and book chapters on Russian and Czech modernism, exile literature, translingual literature, translation, and the theme of memory in literary fiction. She is co-editor of Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature (Rodopi 2013) and a forthcoming special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies devoted to translation in Russian contexts. She is currently writing a book, funded by a research grant from the Swedish Research Council, which applies memory theory in interpretations of recent novels depicting the Communist period in Central and Eastern Europe. [email protected]

—18— Katharine Hodgson

Boris Slutskii’s Translations of Bertolt Brecht

Abstract Translation offered Soviet poets the chance to touch on potentially controversial subjects as well as a source of income when they had difficulties publishing original work, which was a frequent problem for Slutskii (1919-86). After his death, the publication of archival material revealed just how much of his output, on themes relating to the Stalin era, the war, and the Holocaust had been set aside as unpublishable under Soviet censorship. Slutskii’s prolific output included translations of work by other Soviet writers, but also translations of work by foreign poets. He did have some knowledge of German (opinions vary as to how much), though not, it seems, of other languages from which he translated. Slutskii’s activity as translator of Brecht appears to have been mainly in the mid-1960s, when he produced Russian versions of the songs of Der gute Mensch von Szechuan for the Moscow Taganka Theatre production. Slutskii had a good deal in common with Brecht: both were believers in the ideals of Communism, but painfully aware of the way those ideals had been distorted in practice, both were constrained by post-war censorship in the GDR/USSR. Both were committed to the aesthetics of the avant-garde, and to a poetics of sober reflection, avoiding melody in favour of shifting rhythm, tending towards straightforward conversational diction. This paper will explore Slutskii’s translations of Brecht, considering both their themes and their formal attributes, with a view to discovering the relationship between these translations and Slutskii’s own poetry.

Biography Katharine Hodgson is Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Exeter, UK. For the past three years she has been leading a collaborative project investigating the post-Soviet reconfiguration of the twentieth-century poetry canon, examining questions of the canon and national identity, analysing the role of anthologies, and exploring Boris Slutskii’s position in the post-Soviet canon. Alongside work on Russian poetry of the Soviet period, she has investigated Russian translations of poetry by both Rudyard Kipling and Heinrich Heine, and Russian/Soviet themes in Brecht’s exile poetry. [email protected]

—19— Katharine Holt

Nationality Performance as and in Translation: Embodying Central Asian Literature in the 1930s

Abstract Of the little scholarship on Soviet “nationalities translation” that exists, some of the most illuminating focuses on how original source texts were distorted, obscured, or falsified. In my paper, I will draw on this line of inquiry by examining how “national” writers themselves were treated as source material in the 1930s. More specifically, my contribution will discuss how Central Asian literary figures, including Oraz Tash- Nazarov, Rahmat Mazhidi, Abu al-Qasim Lahuti, and Dzhambul Dzhabaev, appeared in Russian when they were showcased on the all-Union stage as representatives, and embodiments, of their national literatures. Drawing on both published sources and documents from the Russian State Archive for Art and Literature, I will identify several key performances, including speeches at Writers’ Union meetings, public declamations of poetry, and presentations at “national” literary evenings. I will then argue that the records of these events position the performers not only as mediators capable of lauding Soviet socialism and Stalin in their respective “Eastern” idioms, but also as imperfectly translatable repositories of “remnants” from their home cultures. I will contextualize my analysis with a discussion of how Soviet multinational literature was born, to paraphrase Evgeny Dobrenko, and of how Stalinist culture was “orientalized” in the 1930s, as the “Eastern” panegyric gained prominence.

Biography A Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, Katharine Holt is currently adapting her dissertation, “The Rise of Insider Iconography: Visions of Soviet Turkmenia in Russian-Language Literature and Film, 1921–1935,” into the book manuscript Encountering the Desert: Orientalism, Socialist Realism, and Artistic Subjectivity in Soviet Central Asia, 1917–1935. She is also at work on a related research project on how Central Asian literature was translated into Russian and disseminated throughout the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Holt completed her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University in 2013. [email protected]

—20— Zakhar Ishov

An Unlikely Encounter in “December in Florence”: Dante, Lowell and Brodsky. An Unorthodox Outcome of a Translating Collaboration

Abstract Soon after Brodsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union and his settling in the USA in 1972, the translation of his own verse into English became a matter of his professional career as an American poet. Between 1975 and 1980 Brodsky supervised the translations of his verse from Russian into English for the collection A Part of Speech. Among several “translating hands” Brodsky commissioned to tackle with his poem “December in Florence” there were those of Robert Lowell. Lowell did not know Russian and therefore worked from an interlinear translation. Brodsky had high regard for Lowell as a poet and shared with him an admiration for Dante, to whom “December in Florence” pays a tribute. Yet, presented with the end result Brodsky dismissed Lowell’s translation. Shortly afterwards Lowell died. Subsequently Brodsky used Lowell’s translation of “December in Florence” almost as a draft for an English version of his own – a draft which he drastically reworked. The detailed comparative study of various translating versions uncovers the logic behind certain decisions of the author-translator and provides an insight into important aspects of Brodsky’s poetics, which transcend the practice of self-translation. At the same time, this unique translating collaboration between Brodsky and Lowell, two major poets in their languages, raises the contentious issue of the ownership over a translation.

Biography Born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Since 1990 resident in Berlin, Germany. In 2008 Ph.D. in English Literature, summa cum laude, FU Berlin, Thesis: “Joseph Brodsky Translating Joseph Brodsky.” Ph.D. in Russian and Italian Literature, Yale University. Dissertation: “Joseph Brodsky and Italy.” (defence in August 2014). Current teaching position: Visiting Instructor of Russian at College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts. Awards: In 2009 recipient of the Charles Hall Grandgent Award from The Dante Society of America. Organized and participated in several translation panels. Last publication: “With a View of the Sea” by Joseph Brodsky translated from Russian with Glyn Maxwell (The New York Review of Books, April 25, 2013). [email protected]

—21— Petar Karavlah

The Longer Journey: Cases of Indirect Translation of Russian into Croatian

Abstract Russian has only recently experienced a sort of revival in Croatia, fueled mostly by Russian tourists who are regarded as good consumers and therefore learning Russian has come to be seen as lucrative. Unlike in other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, where Russian was mostly the first foreign language taught in schools, in former Yugoslavia and especially in Croatia it was not so widespread as advantage was given to English and German. In spite of Croatian and Russian being closely related Slavic languages, these two nations are divided by a wide geographical and cultural gap. Apart from translations of Russian classics, like Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, which are part of the high school curricula, there is little direct contact with the Russian semiosphere. Russian films and series appear only sporadically on Croatian television and virtually the only contact is established through Hollywood films, mostly portraying a picture of Russia laden with stereotypes. Consequently, it is often the case that Russian language and culture arrive to Croatia indirectly, mostly through English. The results of these indirect transmissions are manifold: writing Russian names according to English rules, reading English translations of Russian texts, using English-Russian dictionaries and even translating classics of Russian literature, like Bulgakov, using English translations as source texts. Focusing on these examples, with special attention given to the Croatian translation of Mikhail Bulgakov´s Heart of Dog, I will tackle the issue of indirect translation of Russian into Croatian.

Biography Petar Karavlah was born in 1987 in Slavonski Brod, Croatia. He works as a research and teaching assistant at the Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Zadar, where he is writing a doctoral dissertation Intertextuality as a Translation Problem on the Example of Croatian Translations of Contemporary Russian Fiction and teaching the course Translation of Specialized Texts. [email protected]

—22— Eugenia Kelbert & Saša Mile Rudan Writing Outside Russian: An Experiment in Quantitative Analysis

Abstract This paper, a collaboration between scholars in comparative literature and computer science, theorizes translingual (second-language) work of authors from the Slavic realm as a deeply translational practice and situates it in relation to the much better- studied tradition of self-translation. This potentially includes authors such as Joseph Brodsky, Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Romain Gary, Milan Kundera, Elsa Triolet and, more recently, Andreï Makine, Eva Hoffman and others. Antoine Berman theorizes such texts as “foreign” discourse, but attributing this foreignness to linguistic transfer alone is reductive. Can we read the English “Lolita” as a replacement for the would-be translation of a hypothetical ‘original’ Nabokov could have written in Russian? And, crucially, could the self-translated Russian “Lolita” have been written directly in Russian? Switching languages leads Nabokov to produce a text that may not have been imaginable in Russian, raising further questions as to the status of the self-translation. One way to explore these complex issues is to systematically compare stylistic features of texts written in and ‘outside’ Russian. In this paper, we employ a custom- written literary texts processing system for a study of literary texts and their self- translations. These quantitative methods complement our analysis of theoretical issues with a comparison of Russian, English and French corpora by three authors of Slavic origin: Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky and Romain Gary. Tracing and juxtaposing such texts’ stylistic profiles, we attempt to better understand whether the language of self-translation between L1 and L2 may objectively differ from that of an original work.

Biography Eugenia Kelbert is a Lecturer/Research Associate in Slavic Languages and Cultures at the University of Passau. Her research focuses on the phenomenon of second language writing (translingualism) in the 20th century, translation and digital humanities. She is completing her dissertation in Comparative Literature at Yale University, entitled “Acquiring a Second Language Literature: Patterns in Translingual Writing from Modernism to the Moderns,” and an MPhil in translation studies at the Ecole Supérieure d'Interprètes et de Traducteurs (ESIT). She has published in journals including The Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES. [email protected]

Biography Saša Mile Rudan is a Ph.D. student at Oslo University. He specializes in complex collaborative socio-technical systems (be it architecting and conducting research on them, leading transdisciplinary production teams, or taking an entrepreneur role), social processes, and knowledge management. His interest in literary analysis lies in bridging the socio-technical gap for scholarly research, in the QAQA methodology (Qualitatively Augmented Quantitative Analysis) and in supporting under-resourced languages. These interests led to his involvement in two projects: LitTerra (www.LitTerra.info; augmenting books, providing a literary-ecosystem with deep in- book and inter-book insights) and Bukvik (Bukvik.LitTerra.info), a research infrastructure for literary scholars. [email protected]

—23— Hannu Kemppanen

Brotherhood of Nations or Exporting Ideology? Translating Non- Fiction from Russian into Finnish in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract The present paper introduces a study on Russian-Finnish translations of non-fiction literature from the Soviet period (1970s-1980s). The study aims at examining the function of these translations. It focuses on the following research questions: 1) What was translated? 2) For what purposes? 3) Who were the publishers? 4) Who were the translators? 5) Who were the readers? The function of the translations is examined by using various research methods, including an analysis of the publishing information and paratexts of the books, as well as interviews of individuals involved in the translation and reception processes. The first results of the analyses show that Russian-Finnish translations of non- fiction have mostly been published in the Soviet Union by the publishing house Progress. However there are also translated books by Finnish publishers. The most popular themes of the books include Marxist philosophy, social sciences and economics. The books are provided with explanatory forewords or book jacket texts, giving the readers the “right” framework for their interpretation. Further results will be retrieved from the analysis of the interviews of translators and readers. The paper will discuss the function of the translations in the framework of Finnish-Soviet political relations and translation policy in the Soviet Union and Finland.

Biography Hannu Kemppanen, Ph.D., is Professor of Russian Language and Translation at the University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu, Finland). His main research interests are corpus-based translation studies, studies in translation and ideology, comparative study of Russian and Western translatology, and reception of translations. He has recently been leading an international research project titled as From Russian to Finnish and Vice Versa funded by the Finnish Academy (2009–11). His recent publications include articles in his two co-edited volumes entitled Domestication and Foreignization in Translation Studies (with M. Jänis and A. Belikova) and Beyond Borders – Translations Moving Languages, Literatures and Cultures (with P. Kujamäki, L. Kolehmainen and E. Penttilä), as well as articles in MikaEL and Universitetskoe perevodovedenie conference proceedings. [email protected]

—24— Maria Khotimsky

“The Tenth Muse”: Reconceptualizing Poetry Translation in the Soviet Era

Abstract In his 1961 article published in Literaturnaia Gazeta, Nikolai Chukovsky defined poetic translation as “the Tenth Muse.” A prolific and a reputed translation critic, Chukovsky pointed out significant aspects of poetic translation, such as its ability to shape the writing of those who translate, and to inspire new developments in the recipient literary system. However, what Chukovsky didn’t acknowledge were the tremendous changes that occurred specifically in these aspects of translation during the Soviet era. Like Chukovsky, many critics and scholars hailed poetic translation as one of the main achievements of the Soviet translation school, and often linked it with the pre- revolutionary heritage of Russian poetry. Yet the very approaches to handling the foreign poetics changed greatly with the establishment of stricter stylistic expectations within the Soviet-era translation practices. In this paper, I will explore the tensions within the Soviet-era theory and practices of translation in contrast with the pre-revolutionary translation tradition, which was more open to individual creativity. The discussion will focus on the topics of norm and style, as well as the problem of self-expression via the translated texts. I will consider representative articles on poetry translation published in the Soviet Union from the 1930s-1960s alongside some examples of translations. Methodologically, the article will draw on the studies of translation hermeneutics (Benjamin, Ricoeur, Lefevere, Bassnet), as well as the studies of translation and canon formation within the broader scope of literary development (Holmes, Hermans, Even-Zohar, et. al.).

Biography Maria Khotimsky holds a doctorate degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. Her research interests include the history of literary translation in Russia, Silver Age of Russian Literature, contemporary Russian poetry, and literary institutions. Her current research project addresses the role of poetic translation in the works of several major twentieth-century Russian poets, including Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Maria Petrovykh, Olga Sedakova, Joseph Brodsky, and other authors. Maria teaches Russian language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [email protected]

—25— D. Brian Kim

Sirin’s Inferno: Nabokov’s Alice and the Chaos of Translation

Abstract In literary as well as translation studies, Vladimir Nabokov is well-known for his polemical stance on literal translation; the man responsible for a heavily annotated four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin declared: “The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” Given this attitude, it is surprising that, prior to turning his attention to Onegin, this great advocate of literary translation had a long, productive history of dealing in “absolute evil,” or free translation. The focus of this paper is Nabokov’s Russian translation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1923, published under his nom de plume of V. Sirin), analyzed side-by-side with the original. After firmly establishing Nabokov’s translation as a domesticating one by virtue of its masterful, but audacious treatment of its source – using methods he would later describe as the translator taking “steps to Hell” – I explore Alice’s loss of agency within the linguistic constraints of her new Russian text through the lens of Sirin’s struggle with events beyond his control. I pay special attention to the figure of the Queen of Hearts, who represents the ultimate authority of illogic and chaos, and suggest a relationship between Nabokov’s practice of translation and the power dynamic between the Queen and Ania.

Biography D. Brian Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University, USA. He holds a B.A. in linguistics from Williams College and an M.A. in Japanese literature from Stanford. His dissertation inquires why translators translate, focusing on the pleasure of translation and the encounter with foreign language in the works of four early twentieth-century Russian authors- translators. [email protected]

—26— Lars Kleberg

Translation as Experiment: Ivan Aksenov as Translator

Abstract The paper presents aspects of the translation theory and practice of the poet, essayist, art critic and theater scholar Ivan Aksenov. His literalist translations of Elizabethan drama (Webster, Ford, Tourneur) provoked controversy already when published in 1916. They were part of his anti-traditionalist and avantgarde project, today mainly remembered for the pioneering book on Picasso (1917). In the 1920s and 1930s, Aksenov translated other Elizabethan playwrights and French poetry. The paper will discuss Aksenov’s translation of fragments of Adam Mickiewicz’ Pan Tadeusz in comparison with other Russian translations, including the one made later by Susanna Mar (the poet’s wife).

Biography Lars Kleberg is professor emeritus of Russian at Södertörn University (Sweden) and general editor of the bio-bibliographical database Svenskt översättarlexikon (Swedish Dictionary of Translators): www.oversattarlexikon.se. [email protected], lars.kleberg@gmail

—27— Marina Kostionova

The Three Fates of Charles Dickens in 19th-Century Russia: Translation as Reflection and Formative Factor of Literary Reputation

Abstract Translation is a way of reflecting upon and creating literary reputation of the author. Translation works jointly with literary criticism, methods and circumstances of publishing, reference sources such as encyclopedias, textbooks, readers and scholarship works etc. to create a certain image of the author and the text. To explore how these images of foreign authors are created through translation in Russia would present considerable scholarly interest. One of the most dramatic examples is Charles Dickens translated into Russian in the 19th and 20th centuries. At the time of his initial reception in Russia in the late 1830s he was considered a second-tier belletrist writing for entertainment, someone like Paul de Kock. Accordingly, his works first appearing in Russian translation were reduced to comic stories and reworked to stress their entertaining quality. But it was trough translation, again, that the cultural status of Dickens was raised in the 1840-1850s. The gifted translator Irinarkh Vvedensky saw Dickens as a realistic novelist, a keen stylist, a preacher of good and a social critic with humour deeply rooted in British everyday life, history and culture — a British Gogol of sorts. Vvedensky’s translations increased the growing popularity of Dickens, and by the end of the 1850s he was accepted in Russia as the greatest of modern novelists. Vvedensky’s translations triggered the process of “classicalisation” of Dickens; in the 1850-70s he was being intensively translated, and in the 1880-90s his status of a classic was secured by textbooks, encyclopedias and, of course, translation: a range of far more precise, though not innovative, translations emerged in those years and were published in various “collected works” and “classics for the people” series. In the 20th century Dickens would be addressed by translators as a classical author, though with different purposes and from different positions.

Biography Marina Kostionova graduated from Moscow State University in 2008. In 2010 returned as a postgraduate student on Translation Studies. Interests include modes and strategies of translation in 19th-century Russia, translation in changing sociocultural contexts, translation and reception of Charles Dickens in Russia. Since 2007 has been participating in literary translation projects lead by A. Borisenko and V. Sonkin. [email protected]

—28— Ekaterina Kuznetsova Hemingway’s Transformations: On the Translation of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Natalya Volzhina and Evgeniya Kalashnikova

Abstract This paper aims to provide analysis of the translation of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” made by Natalya Volzhina and Evgeniya Kalashnikova. Being the only Russian translation of the novel, it has a long history and has been edited a number of times, so there are several versions of this translation beside the official published one. An attempt to compare four versions will be made: the published version (1968), two versions that were prepared for publishing (1941 and 1963) and one of the numerous samizdat versions. The Russian translation of For Whom the Bell Tolls is worth examining from at least two points of view. On the one hand, it is the challenges of the original text itself, for both the “Spanish English” and peculiar Spanish atmosphere in the novel force the translator to choose between foreignizing or domesticating strategies (using the terms of Lawrence Venuti) even more intense. On the other hand, the influence of cultural and social context on the process of translation can hardly be exaggerated. Being first translated in 1941, it was eventually published only in 1968, after numerous attempts and with many cuts for political reasons. During all this period the book was met with both high readers’ demand and various censorship restrictions, and the influence of these factors on the text is worth examining. This paper is an attempt to trace the transformation of translators’ and editors’ choices and strategies from one version to another.

Biography Ekaterina Kuznetsova is a philologist, translator, and a postgraduate student at Moscow State University. In 2011 she defended a specialist thesis called "Ideological and Censorial Changes in the Adaptation of a Translated Text. Case Study: Soviet- Era Translations of the 1950s-1960s". Now she is working on a PhD thesis on Soviet translations of Ernest Hemingway’s prose. [email protected]

—29— Ingrid Maier

The Russian Court Theater in the 1670s as an Example of Transcultural Relations between Western Europe and Russia

Abstract When Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and his family watched a play at court in October 1672, they were doing something that had never happened in Russia before. This was the first performance of a Western-style play in Russia, the opening act of a brilliant dramatic tradition. In this presentation I will concentrate on the prehistory of this event, which has been little studied in the last century, and introduce several documents unknown to Russian theatrical scholars. These reveal two earlier performances, from spring 1672, organized by amateur Western actors living in Moscow’s Foreign Quarter. One of these sources is an eye-witness account from the stage itself; at least three newspapers (from Hamburg and Amsterdam) reported about this event. These two successful productions were direct catalysts for the formation of the official court theater later that year, and they show the influence of important Western performance traditions. For example, the character “Pickleherring”, known throughout Northern European stages, was the hit of the spring performances. Not only did the tsar’s court try to hire one of the most famous theatrical troupes in Europe to come to Moscow immediately after these performances, but Pickleherring later appears in the Russian court theater, both as a named character and through his stylized attributes.

Biography Ingrid Maier works as a Professor of Russian at Uppsala University. She has published extensively on 17th-century newspaper translations into Russian ('Vesti- Kuranty'), focusing on the cultural and historical background of this text corpus. At present (2013–2017), she is leading a major international research project on cross- cultural exchange between Western Europe and Russia during the Early Modern period, financed by Riksbankens jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation). She is also a collaborator in a NEH-financed project (led by Claudia Jensen, Seattle) about the history of the Russian court theater. [email protected]

—30— Birgit Menzel

The Interpreter as a Citizen Diplomat. Interpreters’ Role in a Grass-Roots Movement to End the Cold War

Abstract Since the early the 1980’s, thousands of private American citizens spontaneously took political matters into their own hands: they travelled to the USSR to meet “the enemy” face to face. These “citizen diplomats” changed entrenched adversarial attitudes by pioneering initiatives in business, arts and culture, often skilfully using leading edge communication technologies in surprisingly effective ways, to connect across the Cold War divide. Their activities rapidly escalated into a bold and unique social movement that remains largely obscure and unexplored. Interpreters became deeply involved into these grass-roots initiatives as cultural translators, during informal visits of Soviet officials to the U.S., workshops of psychotherapists in the USSR, during the first visit of Boris Yeltsin to America, to name just a few projects. In each of them the interpreters’ role went far beyond professional schemes and duties. Often personally committed, interpreters worked on many different levels to bridge mental, cultural and psychological gaps and thus helped redefine Soviet- American relations. In my paper, I will present some concrete examples of these numerous and diverse initiatives, among them the Space Bridges (1982-1989), the first live-encounters of Soviet and American people made possible by satellite technology which became a new format of direct communication, and the Productivity Enhancement Program (PEP– 1996-2008) organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives (CCI). I will discuss the interpreters’ roles, their problems as well as their achievements, how this work expands our understanding of an interpreter’s work and how it is related to politics. I will also offer some perspectives for citizen diplomacy in the reoccurring conflicts of our present time.

Biography Birgit Menzel is Professor of Russian Literature and Culture at the Johannes- Gutenberg University Mainz in Germersheim, Germany. Her relevant publications include Civil War on Words. Russian Literary Criticism of the Perestroika (Bürger-krieg um Worte, Cologne 2001, St. Petersburg, 2006); Reading for Entertainment. Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective, ed. with Stephen Lovell (Munich, 2005); Kultur und/als Übersetzung. Russisch-deutsche Beziehungen im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, ed. with Christine Engel (Berlin, 2011), The New Age of Russia. Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, ed. with Michael Hagemeister, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Munich, 2012). Her current research project is the Soviet-American citizen diplomacy exchange movement. [email protected]

—31— Ronald Meyer

The “Sad Young Literary” Keith Gessen: Novelist, Journalist, Translator

Abstract Keith Gessen, the Russian-born American novelist, journalist, and editor of n+1, published his widely reviewed debut novel All the Sad Young Literary Men in 2008. Adrian Wanner rightly notes that Gessen in his novel refuses “to play the Russian card.” Nevertheless, the chapter “Isaac Babel,” according to Gessen, grew out of his translation of Babel’s “Guy de Maupassant.” Since the publication of his novel he has kept himself in the public eye principally through his journalism in The New Yorker, by and large on Russian topics, and translation (Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, and more recently Kirill Medvedev’s collection of poetry, It’s No Good)—not to mention a cameo appearance on the television show “Gossip Girl.” In his essay “What Is Translation For?” (2013), Gessen writes that one question to be asked when embarking on a translation is “What will it bring to the host country or literature that it does not yet have?” Gessen, like Medvedev, seeks to align his creative work with his politics, as befits an active participant in the Occupy! movement. I propose to investigate the place of translation in the work and translation practices of this translingual writer, including Gessen’s promotion of literature in translation as editor of n+1, where he published his own translation of Sorokin’s “The Norm” in issue 1, setting the agenda for translation in the journal, as well as excerpts from his Petrushevskaya and Medvedev projects, which, significantly, are both collaborative projects.

Biography Ronald Meyer teaches the seminar on Russian Literary Translation at Columbia University. He is the translator of Anna Akhmatova, My Half-Century: Selected Prose (second paperback edition: Overlook/Ardis, 2013); Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories (Penguin Classics UK, 2010); and three stories by Anton Chekhov, in the new Norton Critical Edition of Chekhov’s Selected Stories, edited by Cathy Popkin (2014). His translations of short stories by Julia Belomlinsky and Vadim Levental appear in the anthology St. Petersburg Noir (Akashic Books, 2012). He is a member of the ReadRussia Translation Prize jury. [email protected]

—32— Kåre Johan Mjør

Creating its Own Platos? The Transfer and Adaptation of Philosophy in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia

Abstract The westernising reforms of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century also inaugurated the importation of West-European institutions of higher learning and research, beginning with the establishment of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1724, and continuing with the University of Moscow in 1755. The early history of Russian universities, in the words of Andrei Andreev and Sergei Posokhov, is the history of the “transfer into Eastern Europe of the European ‘university idea’ and its adaptation there.” This paper zooms in on the transfer and adaptation of one particular academic discipline into Russia(n): philosophy. Philosophy has traditionally been associated with a high degree of abstraction and metareflection, and in his opening lecture on philosophy at the Moscow University in 1755, Nikolai Popovskii described it as the “mother of all the sciences and arts.” Throughout the nineteenth century, however, Russian intellectuals would often complain that despite our successes in all other scientific fields, we still do not have “our own philosophy.” Apparently, the transfer of philosophy was not very successful. In particular the intellectually repressive regime of Nicholas 1 was highly suspicious of philosophy, fearing another Decembrist uprising. This paper discusses some of the attempts to adapt the discipline of philosophy to the requirements of the Russian empire during the first century of university philosophy in Russia, in which academic philosophers sought to reconcile their quest for intellectual creativity and maturity with the ideologies of the regime.

Biography Kåre Johan Mjør holds a PhD from the University of Bergen (2009) and is the author of Reformulating Russia: The Cultural and Intellectual Historiography of Russian First- Wave Émigré Writers (2011) as well as several articles on Russian philosophy, historiography and intellectual history. He has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies (2011–2013) and a visiting fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki (2013). [email protected]

—33— Daniele Monticelli

Battling Around the Exception: A Stateless “Russian” Writer and His Translation in Today’s Estonia

Abstract The large Russian-speaking minority has been the most problematic inheritance of Soviet times and the most challenging political issue for independent Estonia over the last 20 years. Different approaches to this issue – from assimilation and integration to indifference and separation – by both the Estonian authorities and the Russian community have been heavily loaded with clear-cut understandings of linguistic and cultural identity which are far removed from the much more fluid situation on the ground. The presentation deals with these questions by making a case study of the Estonian reception of Andrei Ivanov, a novelist born in Tallinn, though officially a “citizenshipless alien”, who writes in Russian and whose recent international success (his novel Puteshestvie Khanumana na Lolland was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize) has generated among Estonian literary critics, scholars and the public a distinctly symptomatic debate on the place of his work within the Estonian cultural field: should he be considered as a Russian, an Estonian, a Russian-Estonian or a transnational writer? I will critically examine the fundamental role that the opposition between Ivanov’s (Russian) originals and their (Estonian) translations played in this discussion, where it was made into a criterion for the individuation of an essential linguistic and cultural identity, the distinction between originary and derivative, proper and improper, own and foreign. Drawing on Ivanov’s characterization of our human condition as “dwelling in a refugee camp” and his personal condition as “emigration in respect of his own past”, I will suggest a deconstructive approach to both identity and originality grounded on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of exception.

Biography DANIELE MONTICELLI holds a PhD in Semiotics (2008, Tartu) and an MA in Philosophy (1995, Milano). He works as Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Semiotics at Tallinn University where he chairs the Department of Romance Studies. His fields of research include philosophy of language, translation studies, literary semiotics and contemporary continental philosophy with particular focus on the political theories of Agamben, Badiou and Rancière. He has published articles and collections on these topics and some literary translations from Estonian into Italian. He regularly publishes essays on Estonian cultural journals and writes as a political columnist for Estonian newspapers. [email protected]

—34— Elena Ostrovskaya

Translating a Book of Verse: The Case of Russian Auden

Abstract The paper addresses the phenomenon of a book, a collection of poems in translation, as an object of multi-level analysis. The case of Russian Auden is problematized as a number of theoretical issues in translation and literary studies: a book vs publications in periodicals, translation as interpretation, translation as commentary, translation as rewriting and manipulation (Lefevere). The two books of poetic translations comprising the Russian Auden in the book form (Auden, W.H. Collection of Verse, trans. V.L. Toporov, 1997; Auden, W.H. Labyrinth, trans. V.P.Shestakov, 2003) are considered in a wider context of Auden’s coming to the Russian audience, from the early 1930-s attempts at introducing the poet to the Soviet reader by International Literature magazine to commentaries accompanying his prose and poetry in Russian publications, from 1975 publication of translations by P. Grushko and A. Sergeev to the two books to the newest amateur translations published online. Political and poetic interpretations are juxtaposed to produce the corpus of the Russian Auden. The main object of the study, though, is the phenomenon of a collection of translated poetry as a book in the Russian (Soviet) tradition of translation and publication.

Biography Elena Ostrovskaya holds a doctorate degree (Kandidatskaya) in Russian Literature from the Russian State University for the Humanities (the subject of her thesis was Innokentij Annenskij’s poetic translations from and his wider appropriation of the French Poetry of 19th century). Her research interests include comparative studies of poetry (Russian, French and American parallels), poetics of poetic translation and poetics of urbanism. Her current research project is focused on poetics of urbanism in Russian and American modernism (1890-1910). Elena teaches a variety of courses in English and Russian literature, academic discourse and English-Russian translation in the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (Moscow). [email protected]

—35— Tatiana Pentkovskaya & Anastasia Urzha

Metatext Verbalization in Early and Modern Russian Translations

Abstract The nature of metatextual operators (A. Wierzbicka), appealing to the addressee, in some way shaping his interpretation of the speaker’s activity, is explicitly revealed in translation. Even in Old Church Slavonic translations of religious texts (appeared at 11th-13th centuries in Russia), where the interpreter was inevitably bound to the original, we find regular explications of metatext grasping the attention of the addressee to the narrated facts. The earliest contexts of that kind can be found in dialogues, later they appear in the narration itself. Modern translations show the variety of techniques used by translators interpreting the original metatext: its verbalization, first of all, reflects the individual interpretation of the author’s ideas and style by the translator. On the other hand, it depends on the genre of the text and the target audience. As a result, the original can be represented by translations that differ significantly according to the number and the kind of metatextual words used. The report highlights the interrelations between metatext, time and modality in a narrative, focuses on the changing images of the speaker and the addressee in early and modern translations.

Biography Pentkovskaya Tatiana Viktorovna, professor, PhD. Russian Language Department, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Research: Old Church Slavonic, Old Russian, The Language of Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian translations. Graduated from Lomonosov MSU, Faculty of Philology (1993). PhD in ‘Russian Language’ (1998), Doctoral thesis in ‘Russian Language’ (2009). September, 2002 — May, 2003. Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Library and Collections (Washington D.C., USA). 2011 -2013 research grant of Russian Research Fund of Humanities. More than 60 publications (one monograph, 3 manuals). http://www.philol.msu.ru/~ruslang/about/employee/pentkovskaya.t.v/ [email protected]

Biography Urzha Anastasia Victorovna, associate professor, PhD. Russian Language Department, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Research: Contrastive Linguistics, Functional Grammar, Russian Syntax, Semantics, Stylistics, The Language of Russian Literature and Russian Translations. Graduated from Lomonosov MSU, Faculty of Philology (1997). PhD in ‘Russian Language’ and ‘Comparative Linguistics, Typology and Contrastive Linguistics’ (2002), grants ‘Perspective Lecturer’ (2005, 2010), ‘Lecturer-online’ (2011).More than 60 publications (one monograph, 4 manuals). http://www.philol.msu.ru/~ruslang/about/employee/urzha.a.v/ [email protected]

—36— Irina Pohlan

Bringing New Life to Foreign Thought: Potentials and Limits of Translation in Russian Translation Studies

Abstract The paper analyses the impact of translation on the development of the particular disciplines - such as linguistics, cultural and translation studies. I start with the Soviet period when translation played a significant role as an instrument of appropriation of foreign thought and as demonstration of self-sensed cosmopolite nature of the proletarian culture and of the Soviet scholarly discourses. Different Western concepts were introduced to the Soviet academic audiences through translation and began to live autonomous lives in the Russian speaking academic community. My study aims to show how some adopted concepts became a part of the Russian academic discourses, caused a transformation and were themselves modified through translation. In the post-Soviet period the approaches were taken up again and influenced the developing of many disciplines and fields of study that are considered to be “genuine” Russian and that today are dominant in the Russian linguistics, cultural and translation studies. The actors of the knowledge transfer will be examined. Potentials and limits of communication between conceptual frameworks and ways of representation of scholarly discourses across cultures will be discussed.

Biography Graduated translator (Diplom-Übersetzerin), research associate, Ph.D. candidate. Topic of thesis proposal: “Russian and German Scholarly Cultures and Discourses as Problem of Translation”. She holds two Diploma degrees (equivalent to MA): in German and English Philology form the Volgograd State Pedagogical University (Russia) and in Translation and Cultural Studies from University of Mainz/Germersheim (Germany). Since 2006, she has been working as a freelance translator and tutor of Russian, German and English. In summer 2012 she went to the United States for a two years’ stay. Recent publication: The journal “Osteuropa” as a forum for Russian–German academic dialogue, in: Russian Journal of Communication, 1/2014, pp. 32-51. Co-editor of: Alekseeva, Irina; Menzel, Birgit; unter Mitarbeit von Irina Pohlan. Russische Übersetzungswissenschaft an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert [Russian translation studies on the threshold of the 21st century], Berlin: Frank&Timme 2013. [email protected]

—37— Elena Rassokhina

Translating Shakespeare into Russian: Problems of Vocabulary

Abstract It is well established within Shakespeare commentary that his wide-ranging vocabulary reflects the range of social institutions in Elizabethan England. This range presents Russian translators with specific difficulties when translating Shakespeare’s canon in general and his sonnets in particular. The sonnets explore ideas of love, beauty, aging, sexuality, time, gender, etc. that are often presented through the use of recurring symbols and extensive images reflecting some of the key themes underpinning the Renaissance worldview. Within the sonnet cycle, one can find technical phraseology from the fields of law, chemistry, music, theatre, navigation, politics, economics, military and so on. All these linguistic and cultural features require the translators to find the corresponding terms and images in Russian. Attempts have been made to recreate the sonnets’ various settings and themes so that they would be linguistically as distinctive in Russian as they are in English. Using examples from several sonnets, I aim to demonstrate the Russian translators’ strategies dealing with Shakespeare’s vocabulary within, for instance, the legal domain.

Biography Rassokhina Elena is a PhD candidate in language studies at the Department of Language Studies, University of Umeå, Sweden. The purpose of her research is to analytically compare how different writers have translated Shakespeare’s sonnets into Russian. Elena graduated from State University of Nizhny Novgorod in Russia with M.A. in Philology in 1990. [email protected]

—38— Galina Rylkova

Vladimir Nabokov as a Teacher, Translator and Commentator

Abstract At Cornell Nabokov taught courses on Russian and European literature in translation. His copious notes and lectures have been collected posthumously as Lectures on Russian Literature and as Lectures on Literature. The Public Library in New York has many books from Nabokov’s own library that show many comments by Nabokov on the English editions of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Kafka’s Metamorphoses, Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, and Proust’s Swann’s Way, to name but a few. He used these editions to prepare for his famous lectures. In his marginal notes Nabokov primarily complained about the inadequate translations and suggested his own versions. In my talk I will discuss in detail some of Nabokov’s comments. I submit that Nabokov’s zealous editorial exercises had the nature of self-therapy. Not daring to criticize the works themselves, he directed his critical ardor toward their imperfect doubles. Once the relationship between Nabokov and the text (any masterpiece) had been established, he would advance with his editorial efforts suggesting certain changes and omissions in the original texts themselves. While Nabokov was notoriously secretive about his sources of inspiration, primarily because he was often compared to this or that great writer and was often called on to prove his legitimacy and originality, his comments on translated texts gave him a much-needed outlet to vent his Bloomian anxieties of influence. He did not criticize Tolstoy or Proust. All he did was criticize their inadequate renditions into English. Another important aspect is the intended audience of Nabokov’s re-translations. Since his retranslations were meant to be read out loud by Nabokov and heard by his students rather than read, Nabokov often opted for somewhat simplified syntax and vocabulary, making Tolstoy and Proust sound like a contemporary American writer.

Biography Galina Rylkova is Associate Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Toronto in Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is the author of The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and Its Legacy published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2007. Her current research interests include: Psychology of Creative Personality; Chekhov; Cultural Memory; Biography; and Russian Theater. She is working on her second book, “Creative Lives: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer.” [email protected]

—39— Karine Åkerman Sarkisian

Metaphrase and Beyond: Rethinking the Medieval Translation of Slavic Hagiography

Abstract Established research practices with regard to early Slavic translations tend to focus on lexical features for text-critical purposes, primarily with the aim of ascertaining the linguistic origin of a translated work. While legitimate for other purposes, such an approach has not been appropriate for detecting and understanding the craftsmanship of medieval translators. Taking as its starting point theoretical perspectives developed within contemporary translation studies, this paper focuses on translation strategies applied by medieval translators of hagiographic texts. It examines lexical aspects of early translations of the Byzantine Life of St. Onuphrius, elucidating strategies used in medieval translations of hagiography which contradict the established idea of metaphrase as the basic type of rendering during this period. The paper will discuss puzzling textual elements, which at first sight might appear to be erroneous translations. It will suggest that several divergences from the source text can be explained as a conscious choice on the part of the translator. Translation strategies conceptualized within contemporary translation studies using terms such as localization, globalization, domestication, and exoticization, appear to have been applied in medieval translations.

Biography Karine Åkerman Sarkisian holds a PhD in Slavonic Languages and is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University. She also holds a MA in Romance Languages. Her doctoral dissertation (Zhitie Onufrija Pustynnika v rukopisnoj traditsii srednevekovoj Rusi (Uppsala University, 2007) traces the reception of the St. Onuphrios vita and its tradition among the Slavs. It also includes a linguistic study and a text-critical edition of the aforementioned vita. [email protected]

—40—

—41— Brigitte Schultze

Polish Plays for the Russian Theatre Landscape 1989-2010

Abstract After 1989/90, and especially since the end of the 1990s, tremendous change has been going on in the Polish (Schultze/Makarczyk-Schuster 2008; Burzyńska 2013) and the Russian (Davydova 2005; Dugdale 2009; Göbler/Rodewald 2013) theatre landscapes. What interests here are not translations of the Polish theatre classics of the 20th century made available to Russian readers after 1990, but contemporary theatre texts: Since the end of the 1990s, both Poland and Russia saw an unprecedented boom of new plays. An anthology of Polish-Russian drama translations (Pavlovskij 2010) and further texts offer the “Russian theme” and plenty of further current topics for Russian recipients. Comparative translation analysis includes 14 Polish plays by different authors. Specific attention is paid to the type of translatory challenge and solutions found by the translators, but also the handling of the cultural technique drama translation as such.

Biography Prof. Dr. Brigitte Schultze, em., held the chair of West Slavic Literatures at Mainz University. Her main Slavic languages and literatures are Polish, Russian and Czech. Among the fields of research (implying English and American literatures) are the poetics of literary genres, a number of topics within cultural studies and historical and systematical problems of translation. [email protected]

—42— Aleksei Semenenko

“O heinous, strong and bold conspiracy!” On Recent Russian Translations of Hamlet

Abstract Hamlet has long ago become “a special text” in Russian culture and constitutes a separate translation problem. There are almost thirty full translations of the play since 1828, not counting numerous texts in various ways connected to the play, and several of them became canonical during different periods of Russian history. This paper focuses on Hamlet translations of the last fourteen years by Andrei Chernov, Igor Peshkov, Aleksei Tsvetkov, Andrei Pustogarov, Sergei Stepanov, Anatolii Agroskin, Valerii Anan’in, and Alexander Baranov on the background of the general state of Shakespeare scholarship and translation practice in Russia. What is peculiar about this period is that almost half of these translations belong to the so-called “private projects,” and the other half represents a peculiar “conspiracy camp.” The translators that belong to this camp not so much attempt to translate the text but treat it as a sacred message that needs to be deciphered. Hamlet is thus used by these translators for promotion of various conspiracy theories, including the question of Shakespeare’s authorship.

Biography Aleksei Semenenko is associate professor at the Slavic Department of Stockholm University and a lecturer in semiotics at the Dept. of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University. He is the author of Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation (Stockholm University, 2007), The Texture of Culture: An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Aksenov and the Environs (with Lars Kleberg; Södertörns högskola, 2012), and other works on translation, literature and semiotics. [email protected]

—43— Timothy D. Sergay

Jakobson, Whorf and “the Dogma of Untranslatability”

Abstract According to a recent study of reference literature, the vast topic of “Roman Jakobson and translation” is largely based on very few loci classici. In one of these, the 1959 article “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” Jakobson rejects the “dogma of untranslatability,” a dogma of “strong” linguistic determinism that he attributes to Benjamin Whorf: “All cognitive experience and its classification,” Jakobson insists, “is conveyable in any existing language.” And yet considerable commentary by Jakobson dating to the 1930s argues for the untranslatability of Russian grammatical categories in verse translations of Pushkin into Czech. Between these two positions there would seem to be if not a plain contradiction, then at least a certain logical tension. Problems entailed include (1) distinguishing “cognitive experience” from the semantic effect of grammatical categories (Jakobson’s “poetry of grammar”), and (2) differentiating categories of equivalence in such famous Jakobsonian formulations as the Projection Principle and “equivalence in difference.” Reckoning even schematically with these and related problems should clarify not only Jakobson’s stance toward Whorf, whose notion of linguistic patternment he admired, but also the relationship between Jakobson’s thought and today’s highly “Whorf-Sapirian” explorations of the Russian “linguistic picture of the world” (Apresian, Levontina, Pavlovskaia, Shmelëv, Wierzbicka, et al.), a topic of inexhaustible interest for Russian translation specialists.

Biography Timothy D. Sergay, an associate professor of Slavic studies at UAlbany, NY, is active in both scholarship and literary translation. In scholarship, he concentrates on twentieth-century poetry, especially Boris Pasternak, following his dissertation (2008) on Pasternak’s Christian sensibility in relation to Berdiaev, Fedorov, Blok, and Dickens. In translation, he recently translated a highly regarded contemporary Russian historical novel by Aleksandr Chudakov (1938-2005), Lozhitsia mgla na starye stupeni, (A Gloom Descends Upon the Ancient Steps—not yet under contract). In scholarly articles and review essays, he has frequently stressed problems of translation or a translator’s perspective on “difficult” or “obscure” passages. [email protected]

—44— Daria Shirokova

Soviet Interpreters at the Nuremberg Trials

Abstract The Nuremberg Trials marked the end of WW2 and the birth of simultaneous interpreting as we know it today. Moreover, Nuremberg was a propaganda battlefield between the USSR and the other allies at the time when Churchill declared that the Iron Curtain had descended across Europe. Interpreters, notably in the Russian booth, were on the forefront of this ideological battle. Tatiana Stupnikova’s memoirs, published in Moscow 15 years ago, give a valuable insight into the life and work of Soviet interpreters in Nuremberg. Not only had they to provide the voice for the most important political and military leaders of the Third Reich or to interpret the woeful testimony of former concentration camps prisoners – it was in the courtroom that they learned the truth about the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Katyn massacre and couldn’t help comparing two totalitarian regimes. In my presentation, I will discuss the [Soviet] interpreters’ take on the Nuremberg narrative as well as other questions, such as the significance of the interpreters for the trial and that of the trial for the interpreters.

Biography Daria Shirokova, M.A. Conference Interpreter for Russian, German and English, Diploma in Regional Studies. She studied at Moscow State Linguistic University and at the Faculty for Applied Translation Studies of University of Mainz in Germersheim. She is a university lecturer at IÜD Heidelberg and FTSK Germersheim, teaching simultaneous and consecutive interpreting into Russian, as well as a freelance conference interpreter working for the European Commission in Brussels. Her research interests focus on the work of Russian interpreters at the Nuremberg trials and on the history of conference interpreting in Russia in general. [email protected]

—45— Victor Sonkin

The Everlasting Classics: Why the Translation of Greek and Roman Authors into Russian is a Special Case

Abstract A wide variety of approaches has been tried in Russian translation practice in the 20th century. They covered the whole field from rampant domestication to pedantic literalism. This diversity was especially evident in poetry. However, the classical heritage of Greek and Roman literature, with a few notable exceptions, were in a class of their own. Unlike all other types of poetry (Western European classics, Oriental classics, poetry of the Soviet republics, etc.), classical works were almost exclusively translated from the original languages by classicists who kept as close to the style, meter and other features of the original as was linguistically possible — an oasis of foreignization in the otherwise rather domesticating Soviet tradition. The curse which the Greeks and Romans in their Russian clothes did not escape (and which they shared with the others) was the displacement of originals by translations and the unimpeachable status of “accepted” (read: published) translations. Even to this day, new attempts to rethink and retranslate classical authors, especially if they deviate from the established scholarly paradigm, are met with suspicion. The paper will cover the emergence of this situation and those rare exceptions that made the rule all the more obvious.

Biography Victor Sonkin is a literary scholar, critic and author. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1992, and defended his PhD thesis on Slavic verse theory in 1998. He has since worked as translator for the UN, conference interpreter, columnist for English-language newspapers, and teacher of translation (jointly with Dr. Alexandra Borisenko). The products of their translation seminar, two anthologies of British and American crime fiction, were a critical and commercial success in Russia. In 2013, his historical guidebook “Here Was Rome: Modern Walks in the Ancient City” has won the “Prosvetitel” prize, Russia’s most prestigious award for nonfiction. [email protected]

—46— Marja Sorvari

Translating Between Cultures: Zinaida Lindén’s Translingual Novels

Abstract The paper contemplates the concept of diaspora as translation from one culture to another and discusses the case of Russian-Finnish-Swedish writer Zinaida Lindén. The concept of diaspora is frequently used in migrant studies to describe how the connections between ethnicity, culture, identity and place have become blurred. The concept can be used to refer to a dispersed nation which will never return back to its home but which has to come to some kind of “agreement” with the new culture. These people belong to more than one world, they speak more than one language, and they have more than one identity and home; they have learned to cope with this situation and translate from one culture to another. One interesting example of such a case in Finland is the Russian writer Zinaida Lindén and her works. Zinaida Lindén (b. 1963) is perhaps the best-known among contemporary writers with a Russian background living in Finland. She writes her works in Swedish, which is the other second official language and the biggest minority language in Finland. In the paper I will discuss Lindén’s novel I väntan på en jordbävning (2004) as a case of translingual Russian literature in Finland and as a case of self-translation: the author has translated her novel into Russian (V ozhidanii zemletriaseniia, 2005).

Biography Marja Sorvari, Docent, Ph.D., University Lecturer in Russian, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu Campus; specializes in contemporary Russian literature and culture. Her research interests include, and she has published on, the following topics: gender, autobiographical writing, and cultural memory in Russia; lay accounts of health, and wellbeing in post-Soviet Russia; constructions of identities “in-between” two cultures in Russian multicultural writing; representations of “liminality” in contemporary Russian fiction. [email protected]

—47— Yulia Tikhomirova

The Poetic Translation Genre System of Russian Romanticism as a Cultural and Literary Phenomenon

Abstract Dealing with the cultural period responsible for further development of both the art of Russian literary translation and Russian classical literature per se, this paper explores the emergence of Romantic poetic translation genres. The latter are understood as a diverse system of adaptation strategies, where the genre criterion is the author’s attitude to his own text as a product of intentional activity in the frame of “one’s own – non self/alien”. This gradation is grounded in the view of translation as an aesthetic phenomenon, which is also the reason for more than half of Russian Romantic poetry being translations and adaptations, thought to be as “own” as original Russian poetry. Taking into consideration that the period under discussion was that in which the New Russian language and literature were created, the merit of which is justly attributed to Zhukovskiy and Pushkin, the paper explores the poetic translations of Ivan Kozlov, their contemporary, friend, and associate, which appear to have been the laboratory for further Russian classical poetry flourishing. On the basis of his poetic translations and the way he approached their nomination we explore how processes and mechanisms underlying the emergence of the Romantic translation genre system impacted cultural production and affected the further development of national literature.

Biography Yulia Alexandrovna Tikhomirova is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philology, National Research Tomsk State University. Tomsk, Russia. She holds Ph.D. in philology (2008, Tomsk State University, Ph.D thesis is Genre varieties of Russian Romantic poetic translations). She is an alumna of 2011/2012 Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program (Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures), where she studied genre varieties of Russian classical poetry translations in the English-speaking reception. Research interests: Russian-UK cultural relations, poetic translation, vocal translation, Russian Romanticism. [email protected]

—48— Piet Van Poucke

(Re)translation, Ideology and Business: The Fate of Translated Adventure Fiction in Russia Before and After 1991

Abstract Even within the largest central literary systems some genres may remain peripheral for a very long time, which raises the necessity of literary translation, as a “normal market response to insufficient or unsatisfactory domestic literary production” (Friedberg 1997: 2). This is also the case with (Soviet) Russia, where some popular literary genres (science fiction, fantasy, detective stories, adventure fiction) remained underrated and underrepresented, and had to be imported from abroad. This paper aims to investigate the way in which the (Soviet) Russian literary world dealt with the shortage of children’s literature and how the attitude towards translated classical foreign adventure fiction evolved during the XXth century, under the pressure of not only esthetical, but also ideological and economical restraints. The paper includes a survey of Russian translations and retranslations of six of the most popular Western adventure fiction authors – Dumas, Verne, London, Stevenson, Cooper and May – in order to examine the influence of two important forces of patronage in (Soviet) Russian culture: ideology and business. With regard to the translation of adventure fiction during the decades before 1985 we notice strong ideological restraints towards Western trivial literature, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a free book market in Russia other forms of patronage, mainly economic considerations, have come into play. In order to investigate the specificity or non-specificity of the Russian situation the paper will also include comparative data about the translation of the aforementioned authors into Dutch and Swedish.

Biography Piet Van Poucke (1968) is assistant professor in Russian language and culture and head of the Russian section of the department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication (Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University, Belgium). He defended his PhD on the early literary work of Ilya Ehrenburg in 1999. His current research activities deal with the following topics: translation of journalistic texts into Russian, translation of metaphor, Western translation policy towards Russian literature, and retranslation of Russian literature. [email protected]

—49— Valery Vyugin

Western Monsters – Soviet Pets? Translation and Transculturality in Soviet Children’s Literature

Abstract Regardless of whether Julia Kristeva is right to suggest that “there is a very close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of the language spoken by it”, the differences between the representation of ideas and the use of topoi in different cultures are often acute. Nor does children’s literature constitute an exception to this rule. In my paper I will examine the ways in which several Western European literary works were transformed in the process of translation or retelling by important Soviet writers (including Samuil Marshak, Kornei Chukovsky, Alexandr Volkov, and Alexsey Tolstoy). It is well known that the strategy of adaptation and simplification was always strong in children’s literature. My interest is how a particular national and social context determined this strategy, and specifically in this paper, how Western European fictions were tuned in to a new Soviet aesthetic and ideological channel. I will focus on rhetorical and ethical aspects of 'translating' the emotion of fear; here, on cannibalism as a literary topos.

Biography Valery Vyugin (Ph.D.) has been working at the Institute of Russian literature of the Russian Academy of Science in St.-Petersburg (Pushkin House), the Department of New Russian Literature as a senior researcher. His research interests range throughout Soviet and Russian literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, theory of literature and cultural studies. He has published two monographs and numerous articles on topics including Socialist Realism, the Russian avant-garde, and Soviet children’s literature with particular focus on Andrei Platonov, Daniil Kharms, Mikhail Zoschenko, and Samuil Marshak. [email protected]

—50— Susanna Witt

Lessons in the “Soviet School”: Translation and Genre

Abstract The “Soviet School of Translation” as a concept emerged in the context of professional self-reflexion within the Soviet translators’ organization as it reassumed its activity after WWII. Beginning in 1948, a battle was fought over translation principles and the very concept of the “Soviet school of translation.” Gradually, through Ivan Kashkin’s promotion of “realist translation” as the prescribed method of the “Soviet school” in particular, the concept became synonymous with domesticating attitudes, implying elisions and rewritings in order to adapt the foreign material to an “ideal” Soviet reader. An important role in the discourse on the “Soviet school of translation” was played by the two Russian renditions of Byron’s Don Juan to appear during the Soviet period: Georgii Shengeli’s translation from 1947 and Tatiana Gnedich’s translation from 1959. While the former came to represent the Other in the establishment of the concept of the “Soviet school,” the latter came to be viewed as its exponent. Drawing on Bakhtinian genre philosophy and recent work by Lawrence Venuti on translation and intertextuality, this paper will explore some possible implications of Shengeli’s and Gnedich’s different approaches for problems of translation and genre.

Biography Susanna Witt is associate professor and researcher affiliated with the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. She specializes in the history and culture of Russian translation and is the author of “Between the Lines: Totalitarianism and Translation in the USSR” (in Contexts, Subtexts, Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Brian James Baer, John Benjamins 2011), “The First All-Union Conference of Translators, Moscow, 1936, and the Ideologization of Norms” (in The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia, eds. Leon Burnett & Emily Lygo, Peter Lang 2013), “The Shorthand of Empire: Podstrochnik Practices and the Making of Soviet Literature” (Ab Imperio, 3, 2013), and “Byron’s Don Juan in Russian and the Soviet School of Translation” (Translation and Interpreting Studies, forthcoming). She is currently working on a project entitled “The Interface with the Foreign: The ‘Soviet School of Translation,’ Cold War and World Literature.” [email protected]

—51— Elena Zemskova

Literary Translation as a Profession in the Soviet Union: The Case of Alexander Romm

Abstract The paper focuses on the biography of Alexander Ilych Romm (1898 - 1943) who can be described as a typical Soviet translator of the 1930s. His father, a Jewish doctor from Sankt-Petersburg and a member of the illegal Social Democratic party, was sent into exile in Siberia, where Alexander’s younger brother, the future famous Soviet film director Mikhail Romm, was born. In 1922, Alexander Romm graduated from Moscow University with a degree in classics. In the 1920s, he was an active member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and provided the first translation of Saussure’s Le Cours de linguistique générale into Russian. As a poet, Romm published a collection of his verses in 1927. In the 1930s, he worked mostly as a literary translator from French and became a notable member of the Translators’ Section of the Union of Soviet Writers. Romm also actively participated in the campaign of translations from the national languages of the USSR, and in 1934 the Union of Writers assigned him to visit Bashkiria. Based on the materials he had collected during this trip, he published some verse translations and an original poem Doroga v Bikzian (1939). During the Second World War Romm served in the Navy and died in 1943 under unclear circumstances.

Romm’s early life and work had already drawn researchers’ attention. However, his texts and translations of the totalitarian times were generally ignored. Meanwhile the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI) retains some interesting documents, including his diaries, public speeches and translation drafts, which allow us to reconstruct his literary standpoint in the 1930s in details. Especially interesting are the materials from the editorial board of the volume Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR, the monumental collection of pseudo-folklore texts, published in 1937 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Using these facts of Romm's biography as a case in this paper, I will discuss how the social and professional status of the translator was formed and what translation norms were established in the Soviet culture of the 1930s.

Biography Elena Zemskova is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philology, National Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She teaches courses in Comparative Literature and Russian Translation History. Her current project is Discussion on translation methods and the status of translator in the Soviet literary field of the 1930s. Her recent publications on the history of translation are “Translators in the Soviet Writers’ Union: Pasternak’s Translation from Georgian Poets and the Literary Process of the Mid-1930s,” in The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russian Culture (2013) and Philantropist I “Felicia” (in co-authorship with Alla Keuten) in XVIII vek. Sbornik 27 (2013). [email protected]

—52—