The Roles of Pseudo-Editors and Pseudo-Translators in the Soviet Ukrainian Book Market

• In Event: Dynamics of Russification and Cultural Amnesia in Soviet Ukraine

Abstract

This paper introduces the concepts of pseudo-editor and censor-editor and extends the concept of pseudo-translator, arguing for and demonstrating the operation of these terms in the study of Soviet translation history through a postcolonial lens. By the mid-1930s, a significant number of Ukrainian writers and translators became persona non grata, and their translations could only be published anonymously or under the name of another writer or editor who could still be published. In addition to the role of the pseudo-editor who volunteered to help his friend, there were episodes in which the role of the pseudo-translator was played for the same or similar motives, i.e. to get the translation published. Completely anonymous translations were also published in a censored form, often marked “under general editorship”. These editors thus played the role of censors, and from the second half of the 1930s censor-editors officially replaced the executed or banned translators whose texts they edited when preparing them for reprint. As the paper discusses, the role of pseudo-editor could, under certain conditions, help to circumvent political bans in different periods of the Soviet Union, while censor-editors implemented Soviet censorship in a variety of differently labelled new editions: from completely anonymous translations (mostly revised, corrected versions of politically compromised earlier translations) to translations labelled "edited", "edited by" or "translated by" (where the censor-editor played the role of translator). The work of censor-editors often bordered on indirect translations from Russian: rarely acknowledged as such but mostly disguised as direct translations from the foreign original.

Author

• Lada Kolomiyets, Taras Shevchenko National U of Kyiv (Ukraine)