'A High Art,' Tari Devi, and a Matter of Belief

• In Event: Translation and Belief II: Practice, Discourse, Ideology in Translation

Abstract

The paper discusses Mikhail Froman’s translation of Rudyard Kipling’s “La Nuit Blanche” and the ensuing debates over it. Kornei Chukovsky, in his book “A High Art,” singled out Froman’s translation as an anecdotal example of a translator’s blunder. In the translation, Tari Davi is given as a name of a goddess, yet Chukovsky, believing the term to refer to a mountain peak, ridiculed its translation, only to be exposed by Evgeniy Vitkovsky, who pointed out that there is no such mountain peak in the Himalayas. As it discusses the critique and its rebuttal, the paper calls into question the principles of Chukovsky’s critique of translation and analyzes Froman’s translations from Kipling in the context of contemporaneous translators of Kipling (Ada Onoshkovich-Yatsyna, Mikhail Gutner, Susanna Mar).

Author

• Elena Ostrovskaya, NRU Higher School of Economics (Russia)