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ABSTRACT
In the Soviet Union, practices of indirect literary translation, particularly the use of interlinear intermediates, were institutionalized in the early 1930s through special terminology, specific administrative treatment within the literary apparatus, and educational efforts. Such practices continued until the end of the Soviet era, but were intensely debated and criticized, rendering problems of indirect translation both visible and articulated in a unique way. Drawing on archival sources, this article presents an overview of such issues, taking into consideration the heretofore scant attention given the subject in both Western and Russian scholarship. Conceptualizing the massive Soviet experience in the field, it aims at providing new perspectives on the phenomenon of indirect translation.
Note on contributor
Susanna Witt is senior lecturer in Russian literature at the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages, Finnish, Dutch and German at Stockholm University and affiliated researcher at Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. A specialist in Boris Pasternak’s poetry and prose, she has also published widely on topics related to Russian translation history of the Soviet period. Her recent publications include “Byron’s Don Juan in Russian and the ‘Soviet School of Translation’ ”, Translation and Interpreting Studies 11:1 (2016); “Translation and Intertextuality in the Soviet-Russian Context: The Case of Georgy Shengeli’s Don Juan”, Slavic and East European Journal 60:1 (2016); “Pasternak, Łysohorsky and the Significance of “Unheroic’ Translation”, Russian Literature 78 (2015).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Russian State Archive for Literature and Art [RGALI], f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 294, l. 13. All translations in this article are mine (S.W.) if not otherwise indicated.
2. The extent to which intermediate interlinears were used in translation of non-literary texts still remains to be explored; such translation is, as a rule, not reflected in the archival documentation pertaining to the Soviet Writers’ Union.
3. The Nationalities Commission was a body assigned the task of “mutual and broad familiarization with the literatures of the brotherly republics”, at the heart of which was translation. (RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 295, l. 1). In particular, its work was to further the publication of nationalities literature in Russian, thereby giving it access to the “arena of world literature” (RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 295, l. 2). Within its structure were subdivisions such as the Kazakh Commission, the Dagestani Commission, etc.
4. The boom was of course also a result of state and party initiatives, such as the 1935 “Resolution of the Presidium of the Nationalities Council of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR on the Development of Artistic Creation on Part of the Peoples of the USSR” (RGALI, f. 613, op. 1, ed. khr. 4719).
5. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 425. A certain fatigue among the officials may be glimpsed through the archival material: “The procession of jubilees which has been set in motion all over the Soviet land is an indicator of the genuine growth of the cultures of the Soviet people. … However, if people try to invent causes for a jubilee in an artificial way, this is already a dangerous thing” (Skosyrev, RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 295, l. 30).
6. Pseudotranslation as defined by Toury himself is “texts which have been presented as translations with no corresponding source texts in other languages ever having existed – hence no factual ‘transfer operations’ and translation relationships” (Citation1995, 40).
7. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 230.
8. Although a possible case, the podstrochnik was very seldom “a textually-dominated translation”, yielding “products which are well-formed in terms of general conventions of text formation pertinent to the target culture, even if they do not conform to any recognized literary model within it” (Toury Citation1995, 171). In many cases, the qualifier “well-formed” did not apply even at the linguistic level.
9. RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 1, l. 24. Detailing the existing professional qualifications among Soviet translators in the early 1930s, the report provides a virtual snapshot of the whole situation in the field of literary translation at the time.
10. RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 1, ll. 11–12.
11. The career of Ezra Levontin (1891–1968) is quite representative of the category of poet-translator (poet-perevodchik) in the Soviet literary system: having authored several collections of original poetry (far from a proletarian kind) prior to 1928, he could publish mainly as a translator from nationalities langugages (Kazakh, Chechen and Mari, a Finno-Ugric language spoken in parts of Eastern Russia); occasionally he published translations of Western authors such as Guy de Maupassant (see e.g. http://www.vekperevoda.com/1887/levont.htm) and some translation criticism.
12. RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 7, l. 4; here, the applicant is called a “translator” in quotation marks.
13. RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 22, l. 8.
14. Initiatives taken by the Translators’ Section to further direct translation include the following activities reported in 1936: “The Section has organized two-year seminars at the Literary University [at the Writers’ Union] in the art of translation from English, German and French. They are now running successfully in their second year. Currently they are being complemented by seminars on translation from Ukrainian, Georgian, and Turkic langugages, which occupies a prominent place within the literature of the peoples of the USSR while at the same time experiencing a lack of translators (into Russian) (RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 12, l. 26).
15. RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 5, l. 21 (Rozaliia Shor).
16. RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 5, l. 76. The case of Osip Kolychev (1904–73) differs from that of Levontin: translation was not a substitute but a complement to his career as an original, well-published Stalinist poet. Examples of this category were quite numerous as well.
17. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 657, l. 69 (Kostas Korsakas; see Witt Citation2013a for the context of this discussion).
18. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 659, l. 32 (Mikhail Zenkevich).
19. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 657, l. 86.
20. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 657, l. 86.
21. RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 1, l. 33 (Lev Pen’kovskii, 1934).
22. RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 23, l. 21 (Elena Gogoberidze, 1938).
23. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 512, l. 14. It is a fact that many of the works of “nationalities authors” that were actually published could be described in a similar way. Tazhibaev was himself one of the poets engaged in the project of transcribing the oral works of Dzhambul and providing intermediate interlinears, as described above.
24. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 295, l. 6 (Leonid Sobolev, 1939).
25. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 294, l. 2 (Evgenii Korabel’nikov, 1939).
26. The problem had been officially recognized already at the First All-Union Conference of Translators in 1936, the resolution of which stated, with reference to the intermediate interlinears, “[n]oting the extremely low quality of podstrochniki and the howling examples of distortions and ad-libbing [otsebiatina] in translation from the nationalities languages into Russian, it should be suggested to publishing houses that they raise their demands in terms of the quality of their podstrochniki and, with the aim of attracting highly qualified cadres, at the same time increase the payment offered to podstrochniki as much as possible” (RGALI, f. 631, op. 21, ed. khr. 9, ll. 1–2; see also Witt Citation2013b). The impact of this suggestion had apparently been insignificant.
27. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 475, ll. 56–61 (original text published in Witt Citation2013a). In the following, in-text references will be given to sheets (listy) in this document.
28. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 696, l. 2. The points of the 1940 resolution were elaborated further in the article “Literary Translation and Its Portfolio”, written at the request of the Nationalities Commission by the poet-translator Mark Tarlovskii (Citation1940) and published in the periodical anthology Druzhba narodov (Peoples’ friendship), which had been founded in 1939 with a view to providing an “organizational basis for finally settling the problem of translations” (RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 308, l. 7). For more on Tarlovskii’s article, see Witt Citation2011, 161–162.
29. RGALI, f. 631, op. 6, ed. khr. 308, l. 33 (Deev 1939).
30. It should be pointed out, however, that the quality of the intermediate texts could differ significantly: “There are podstrochniki from which the [final] translator picks not only images and individual words but which often provide entire groups of words or even lines. And then there are such podstrochniki with which the [final] translator has to struggle, seeking out other expressions than the ones used in them” (Khachatriants Citation1939, 4). For a case of podstrochnik translation involving both an original text, an annotated interlinear and some contextual information, recalling the requirements as described above, see Witt Citation2015.