Abstract
The article focuses on the reception of Russian classical literature translations in the English-speaking culture. The research was carried out on the material of three existing translations of ‘Forest and Steppe’ by both Russian and English translators published in 1895, 1955 and 1967. The main objective of the research is to determine the difficulties translators of Russian literature of the 19th century could face in the case of Turgenev's epigraph to ‘Forest and Steppe’. The tasks of the study were to define and describe the peculiarities of conveying the epigraph’s vocabulary, to outline the group of the most important keywords of the text, to recognize and describe discrepancies in their translation, to indicate why the chosen option is possible or impossible in the translation of Turgenev’s text. The study showed that Turgenev's worldview was formed under the influence of the culture of ‘rhetorical word’, and the epigraph to ‘Forest and Steppe’ proves it. The epigraph consists of a chain of symbolic images that add up to a single picture. The writer's worldview determined the style of the epigraph, the choice of vocabulary, and the composition of the text. For translators, the main difficulty at the lexical level lies in the fact that they often choose words that carry a greater emotional load than Turgenev’s vocabulary, and also introduce tropes, absent in the original, into translations. On the one hand, the translations create a realistic picture, in contrast to Turgenev’s symbolic landscape, on the other hand, the atmosphere of the text, reflecting the personality of the writer, is destroyed. The translations mirror profound changes that took place in the 19th–20th centuries in the European worldview.
Highlights
Analyzing any translation, we can talk about its adequacy, that is, ‘the reconstruction of the form and content unity of the original through another language’ [Neliubin: 13] and about its equivalence, that is, the same ‘impact’ [Neliubin: 254] on the reader close or not close enough to that of the original
If we look at the epigraph to ‘Forest and Steppe’, we find that it consists of several verbal pictures, for each of which you can pick up an illustration, an example from the area of fine art
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, who belonged in his world-view to the era of the ‘rhetorical’ word, created a emblematic picture
Summary
We can talk about its adequacy, that is, ‘the reconstruction of the form and content unity of the original through another language’ [Neliubin: 13] and about its equivalence, that is, the same ‘impact’ [Neliubin: 254] on the reader close or not close enough to that of the original. Each translated text poses an additional, particular task for translators. The ‘rhetorical era’, as A.V. Mikhailov formulated, was approaching its end (according to A.V. Mikhailov’s observations, the change of eras took place in the 30s–40s of the 19th century, but, as I could notice, in poetry the worldview of this era lasted longer). Ivan Turgenev, born in 1818, was influenced by the ‘emblematic element’ [Mikhailov: 172], that is, a kind of poetic thinking [Mikhailov: 170], where every separate, compact and defined image appears to have an emblematic property [Mikhailov: 172]
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