Dr Anna Rush (Edinburgh; Independent scholar and translator).
Translating Shakespeare’s Life into Russian.
5 November 2018; 12 noon -1 pm; 50 George Square - Project Room 1.06.
The talk (in English) will focus on the strategies of translating into Russian a literary biographical novel Will (first published in 2007 in English and in 2018 in Russia), by a contemporary British author, Christopher Rush. The novel, which begins as a dialogue of the gravely ill dramatist with his lawyer, soon turns into the final soliloquy of the dying bard. Unsurprisingly Rush’s “Shakespeare” quotes freely, both verbatim and paraphrasing from his own works, the Bible, ancient Greek and Roman poetry and plays, contemporary playwrights and in a playfully anachronistic manner, even from the works of the English literary canon which postdate him. I would argue that such a rich and complex postmodernist textual collage poses considerable difficulties for a translator as they have to reconcile the stylised speech of the “Shakespeare”, researched and recreated by the novelist, with the already existing translations of Shakespeare’s works into Russian produced in the last two centuries. The paper considers the difficulties of the identification, the principles of selection and the degree of adjustment of the existing material to the narrative with the view of achieving a vivid, naturally fluent and artistically convincing seamless target text.