Authors

Suzanne Eade Roberts¹;  ¹ University of Bristol, UK

Discussion

Recent research has looked at some aspects of the history of literary translation in the Soviet Union (e.g., Kamovnikova 2019, Baer 2021). However, a hitherto neglected area is the way in which practising Soviet literary translators during the 1950s and 1960s reflected on their practice and that of other translators.

This presentation sheds light on three such translators’ thinking: Kornei Chukovskii’s idiosyncratic work on translation in its 1960s incarnations; Ivan Kashkin’s reiteration in the 1950s of the ‘Realist’ translation he had proposed in the 1930s; and Efim Etkind’s scholarly approach to poetry translation in the 1960s, influenced by the Russian Formalists. It finds that a shared cultural-political context at the time they were writing nevertheless gave rise to strikingly diverse thinking on translation, expressed using a variety of text types and in which the translators engaged with each other’s viewpoints. The three translators’ contrasting ideological orientations, life experiences and attitude to theory are apparent in their choice of form and content. This paper thus allows the immediate post-Stalin period to be seen from a novel angle.