Afanasy Nikitin’s multilingual travel account: translating an encounter between East and West

Abstract

Afanasy Nikitin’s Voyage Beyond Three Seas [Khozhenie za tri morya], one of the most famous Old Russian travel accounts, was created in the second half of the fifteenth century, at the boundary of the late medieval and early modern periods. By understanding travel writing as a translation phenomenon, this paper will focuson how this merchant from Muscovite Russia translates an encounter between East and West during his seven-year journey through Persia, India, and other foreign lands, adapting linguistically to the exotic environment. Nikitin’s multilingual travelogue, written in Old East Slavic and a patois of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic, reveals a complex hybrid identity manifested through the traveller’s syncretic Christian-Muslim habits.