Various planes of retranslation: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in Russian and Latvian

Abstract

ABSTRACT The translations of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) into Russian and Latvian are analyzed in this article in the context of the political circumstances and censorship of the Soviet regime, the impacts of a canonical translation on subsequent translation versions, and the centralized translation instructions enforced upon Soviet Latvia. The first Russian translation of the novel included substantial lexical changes and given its canonical status, this impacted later Russian versions. Moreover, centralized instructions for translations into the languages of the Soviet republics compromised the quality of translation. It is also argued that the revised Latvian translation of the novel was produced in the shadow of the authoritative first translation.