Liberty and Its Limits in Translating Contemporary Poetry and Fiction: The Practical Issues

• In Event: Liberating Translation III: Translating Liberty, Liberty in Translation

Abstract

The paper will discuss practical issues and challenges that arise in translating contemporary Russian poetry and fiction into English (Serenko, Goralik, Bulatovskii, Vilko, among others) in connection with liberty and fidelity and within the theoretical notion of the “length of context” (a unit of the original text of such length for which one can find in a translation an equivalent unit of absolute or near absolute correspondence). The notion of the “length of context” exists in the theory of non-literary translation but is applied by such scholars as Mikhail Gasparov, for discussion and assessment of literalism in literary translation. In Valery Briusov’s words, “Translation . . . should be also usable for the purpose of drawing quotations [of the original] from it.” In other words, if one were translating an English novel into Russian and encountered a quote from Shakespeare in it, one’s first impulse would be to go to an accepted and established translation of Shakespeare for the translation of the quote. However, the existing translation might not necessarily be helpful for this purpose: the principles of translation of a short quote and a whole play are different (because the “length of context” is different) and the particular meaning in the quote might have been sacrificed in the process.

Author

• Julia Trubikhina, CUNY Hunter College