The Coffee Shop by Carlo Goldoni in A. N. Ostrovsky's translation

Abstract

In his manner and creative strategy Goldoni is the playwright most congenial to Ostrovsky of all those who appear in the prolific legacy of his translations. Ostrovsky aims to bring Goldoni even closer with coherent and purposeful text cuts, eliminating from his translation all that establishes a connection between the play under translation and obsolete, from his point of view, dramatic technique, obsolete cultural and stylistic сliches. He reduces the number of asides, omits extended lamentations and, what's more important, struggles against abstract moralizing and sententiousness, the main signs of the rhetorical style. Thus, Ostrovsky adjusts his translation to the tastes and literary habits of the contemporary reader. At the same time, he desists from another way of text domestication, i. e. russifying the language, which is obvious in his translation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. His driving ambition to bring the text closer to the reader coexists in his translation of The Coffee Shop with the idea of keeping a fair distance that shows itself not only in his refusal to russify but also in considerable language changes (use of foreign and rare words, neologisms, deliberate awkwardness and clumsiness of figures of speech). In his translation Ostrovsky implements two strategies. In following one of them (the strategy of abridgments) he brings his text nearer to his epoch; in following the other, he distances the text from his native language. Both strategies are relevant, but their colocation within a single translation represents a rare, perhaps unique case.