Traduzione e rielaborazione nelle letterature di Polonia Ucraina e Russia, XVI-XVIII secolo by Marcello Piacentini (review)

Abstract

528 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 Sorbian or Czech to supply their lexical needs. But, as Dr Pohontsch's statisticalanalysis shows, contributorsto the Lower Sorbian weekly were at first fairly impassive. Though they did borrow a little from Upper Sorbian, theywere only slightlyinhibitedin theiruse of Germanisms.Of the 858 Upper Sorbianborrowingsin thevocabulary,only 55 were introducedin I848- I9I5. After the FirstWorldWar there was a great surge:the number for the period I9I6-33 was 269. In 1947 Lower Sorbian was introduced to the school system,but many of the teachersin LowerSorbianschoolswere Upper Sorbs. Upper Sorbsalsocontributedto LowerSorbianpublications.Not surprisingly, this led to the greatest increase of all in the influence of Upper Sorbian: between I947 and 1959, 367 new borrowings appeared. Significantly,since the mid i970S therehas been a markeddecreasein both the adoption and use of Upper Sorbian borrowings, while Germanisms have been staging a comeback. HerfordCollege, Oxford GERALD STONE Piacentini, Marcello (ed.). Traduzionee rielaborazionenelle letterature di Polonia Ucraina e Russia, XVI-XJXIII secolo. Slavica. Collana di studi slavi, 3. Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria, 1999. 474 pp. Tables. Notes. Index. L7o,ooo. THIS collection of twenty-three papers, delivered at an international conference at Gargnano on Lake Garda, northern Italy in September i 996, illustrates how little the problems confronting translators and the solutions they have devised for them have changed over the centuries. Despite the internet, databases and modern translation theory, present-day translators resort to much the same techniques as their predecessors of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As the collection's title indicates, 'target' languages include Church Slavonic, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish. Among the 'source' languages are Italian, Latin, French, English and the Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament. Most of the contributions deal with translations of specific works; a few are more general; two explore aspects of translation theory. According to A. Borowski in the first of these papers (pp. 23-38), the Polish translators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries postulated three ways of translating. One is word for word, literal translation, which is recommended for translating 'spiritual books'. A second is to deploy to the full the translator's ownI concepts and inventiveness with the aim of producing something like a free adaptation. A third way arose in response to the enthusiastic interest which the sixteenth-century Polish translators from the Italian took in politics. They were well aware of the gulf which separated the Italian culture of the Cinquecento from the mentality of the contemporary Polish reader. So, for such a translator, 'translation did not mean [ ...] any literal transmission of images, ideas or patterns of culture ... .1 the perfect translator should not follow mechanically the original. His task was to remodel it according to native needs and in regard to customs' (pp. 36-37). This is a striking anticipation of modern localization theory. REVIEWS 529 In the second of these papers S. I. Nikolaev (pp. 2 I 5-25) points out that in Russia at the end of the seventeenth centurya theory of translationwas being devised for use with theological works:a theory for the translationof artistic compositionshad to wait untila concept of artisticliteraturehad been evolved (p. 2 I6). The translatorsof the Posol'skiziprikaz leftno recordof theirtheoretical views, but their practice shows that they had no scruplesabout treatingtheir originalsfreely.Nikolaev concludesthatroundthe turnof the centurya Polish poem to be translatedinto Russian had firstto be adapted to an appropriate Russianliterarygenre and that the form, styleand language of the translation would be determined by the characteristics of that genre. In this period, therefore,deviationsfrom the originalsshould not be regardedas distortions; they merely reflect the translation techniques of the time (pp. 222-23). H. Rothe (pp. 109-26) deals with the transmission from one culture to another of a particular literary genre, the spiritual song (dukhovnaia pesnia). He relates how the genre came into being at the end of the Middle Ages and how during the Reformation it spread from Germany and the Czech lands into Poland, where a powerful Protestant movement was stirring among the nobility and the urban populations. Established in Poland, it passed over into Belorussia and the Ukraine, and in i 649 it accompanied the first learned monks to be summoned from Kiev...