«Прием Гавриила» и американское эротическое воображение: Перевод как захват

Abstract

This study of Pushkin's American reception takes as its point of departure a "technical" issue in English translations of the bawdy narrative poem "Gavriiliada" ("The Gabrieliad," 1821). How can the analysis of a translation error or the erroneous concretization of a "motor" image (Tynianov's term) that is obscured in the source text help us to understand the original and its subsequent reception both in literature and in the visual arts? Our focus is on the scene in which Pushkin's Satan is comically "mutilated" by his holy rival, as rendered in Walter Arndt's (1916–2011) translation of the "Gavriiliada" and in the Japanese artist Kinuko Craft's cycle of illustrations for that translation's publication in the Christmas 1974 issue of Playboy. The essay demonstrates that this provocative publication—which was a trilateral collective effort of the male translator, female illustrator, and male art editor—does not "replace" (per Tynianov), "misread" (Harold Bloom), or "mutilate" (Nabokov) the original, but "fills in" and reappropriates Pushkin's "ribald classic" by situating it in the aesthetic, visual and ideological context of an American men's magazine with pretensions to style that reached the peak of its popularity in 1974. What is more, the sacrilegious and bawdy plot of the "Gavriiliada" became a literary expression of Playboy's hedonistic religion.