Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia

This volume presents Eastern Europe and Russia as a distinctive translation zone, despite significant internal differences in language, religion and history. The persistence of large multilingual empires, which produced bilingual and even polyglot readers, the shared experience of “belated modernity” and the longstanding practice of repressive censorship produced an incredibly vibrant, profoundly politicized, and highly visible culture of translation throughout the region as a whole. The individual contributors to this volume examine diverse manifestations of this shared translation culture from the Romantic Age to the present day, revealing literary translation to be at times an embarrassing reminder of the region’s cultural marginalization and reliance on the West and at other times a mode of resistance and a metaphor for cultural supercession. This volume demonstrates the relevance of this region to the current scholarship on alternative translation traditions and exposes some of the Western assumptions that have left the region underrepresented in the field of Translation Studies.

Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgments; 2. Notes on contributors; 3. Introduction: Cultures of translation (by Baer, Brian James); 4. Part I. Contexts; 5. Shifting contexts: The boundaries of Milan Kundera's Central Europe (by Sabatos, Charles); 6. Nation and translation: Literary translation and the shaping of modern Ukrainian culture (by Chernetsky, Vitaly); 7. Vasilii Zhukovskii as translator and the protean Russian nation (by Cooper, David L.); 8. Romania as Europe's translator: Translation in Constantin Noica's national imagination (by Cotter, Sean); 9. Translating India, constructing self: Konstantin Bal'mont's India as image and ideal in Fin-de-siecle Russia (by Sundaram, Susmita); 10. The water of life: Resuscitating Russian avant-garde authors in Croatian and Serbian translations (by Forrester, Sibelan); 11. Translation trouble: Translating sexual identity into Slovenian (by Tratnik, Suzana); 12. Part II. Subtexts; 13. Between the lines: Totalitarianism and translation in the USSR (by Witt, Susanna); 14. Translation theory and cold war politics: Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov in 1950s America (by Baer, Brian James); 15. The poetics and politics of Joseph Brodsky as a Russian poet-translator (by Klots, Yasha); 16. Squandered opportunities: On the uniformity of literary translations in postwar Hungary (by Scholz, Laszlo); 17. Meaningful absences: Byron in Bulgarian (by Kostadinova, Vitana); 18. Part III. Pretexts; 19. Translated by Goblin: Global challenge and local response in Post-Soviet translations of Hollywood films (by Strukov, Vlad); 20. "No text is an island": Translating Hamlet in twenty-first-century Russia (by Semenenko, Aleksei); 21. Russian dystopia in exile: Translating Zamiatin and Voinovich (by Olshanskaya, Natalia); 22. Between cosmopolitanism and hermeticism: Translating classical tragedy into Polish theater (by Kuharski, Allen J.); 23. The other polysystem: The impact of translation on language norms and conventions in Latvia (by Locmele, Gunta); 24. Translation as condition and theme in Milan Kundera's novels (by Rubes, Jan); 25. Index