DELC’s Research Strand “Cultural Encounters/Dialogues”.
Dr Natalia Kaloh Vid (Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, Slovenia).
Title: Sovietisms as Cultural, Historical and Social Realia in English Translations of Mikhail Bulgakov's “A Dog’s Heart”. (In English).
Room: 50 George Square - G.05
Date(s): Mon 28/01/2019
Time: 12:00 - 13:00.
All welcome!
Abstract:
Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastic tale in which he explores the theme of a scientific experiment with devastating consequences was published in the Soviet Union more than forty years after the author’s death. Bulgakov’s frank and satirical view of a great experiment of ‘communism’ to create a new proletarian class, uncivilized, vulgar, without faith, deprived of cultural and moral values and inspired by political idols, could not pass the official censorship.
This comparative corpus analysis is based on six English translations of Bulgakov’s masterpiece by: Michael Glenny (1968), Mirra Ginsburg (1968), Frank Galati (1988, a dramatic adaptation), Hugh Aplin (2005), Andrew Bromfield (2007) and Antonina W. Bouis (2016). Notably Ginsburg’s and Glenny’s translations were released in the West long before the novel was officially published in the Soviet Union in 1987. Thus unique material offers a thorough insight into translation shifts, not only from a synchronic, but also from a diachronic perspective.
Following Antoine Berman it would normally be assumed that the early translations of a given text will be more target-oriented and domesticating than later ones. To this hypothesis, the extent to which retranslations approximate to the source text is examined in terms of how they deal with the type of historical realia I refer to as ‘Sovietisms’. Sovietisms are lexical items characteristic of Soviet discourse of the 1930s, word-formations of the non-standard “Soviet Russian,” which occur at various levels (lexical, syntactic, stylistic and rhetorical) and should be carefully translated as a significant characteristic of Bulgakov’s style. A complete domestication of Sovietisms may lead to a loss of a connotative meaning essential for understanding the context, while a foreignization of these terms which are most likely unknown to western readers may disturb fluidity of reading and cause confusion.