It would seem that the question, whether a translator must comprehend the meaning of words being translated, has an obvious answer: and how else? However, it turns out that in those instances where one limits oneself to transcribing the terms under translation, it is possible to avoid comprehension. Possible, but not necessary. This is shown in our article through the example of an episode from Charles Nodier’s novel The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles (1830). This Sternean novel, which borrows both its title and many devices from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, was never translated into Russian; the author of this article is preparing a translation that will appear in the series “Literary Monuments”. Nodier likely surpassed Sterne in destroying the traditional structure of the novel: his narrator is divided into three characters (the writer Théodore, the pedant Don Pic de Fanferluchio, and the jester Breloque); one chapter is wholly made up of onomatopoeias; a single, consistent narrative is replaced by the competition of various genres within the novel; and within these inserted genres the syntagmatic axis is replaced by the paradigmatic: Nodier concatenates strings of dozens of names, verbs, adjectives, and even a listing of 188 different insects. Among the inserted texts there is the “Eulogy to Mistress Slipper”; it is called a work of genius, yet this cannot be verified, since the one who was reading it aloud fell asleep from boredom and the “Eulogy” burned up in the flame of a candle. While mourning the loss, the narrator lists thirty-five inventions bearing names which end in “-graphy” (cacography, technography, steganography, etc.) and which, in his opinion, are useless, since the “Eulogy to Mistress Slipper” is no longer extant. Now then, strictly speaking, in order to translate these thirty-five “-graphies” the translator does not need to comprehend their meaning or even to know whether they existed in reality or were thought up by the inventive author. At the same time, the problem of whether the “-graphies” are real is not a purely formal one: our comprehension of Nodier’s novel depends on how it is solved.

The article deals with the problem of translating into Russian medieval French and Provencal lyrics of the troubadours and trouvères. The author relies on M.L. Gasparov’s concept of translation; in particular, he speaks about the distinction between “distancing” and approximating, domesticating translation. The article analyzes in detail the translations of a rondeau by Chrétien de Troyes by V. Mikushevich and A. Parin, as well as the translations of a canzona by Jaufre Rudel by V. Dynnik and A. Naiman. The analysis reveals semantic deviations and transformations, as well as techniques that destroy the authentic poetics of courtly lyrics. The author speaks about the inevitability of semantic losses when making a translation into the modern Russian poetic system. When creating a poetic translation, which can be perceived as a “good poem” from the point of view of the translator and his readers, it turns out that exactly what underlies the poetics of the troubadours is unused — traditionality, formularity, a specific ratio of stable tradition and author’s individuality. In order to avoid losses as much as possible, it is proposed to resort to vers libre (free verse). The author refers to the concept of M.L. Gasparov, who wrote about the advantages that free verse offers a translator.

The article analyzes the depiction of social roles in the Russian translation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ‘Parzival’. During his travels, the protagonist has to change three social roles: Parzival begins his journey as a hunter, then there is his transformation into an ideal knight, and finally he becomes the ruler of the Grail Castle. In the original text, each of these roles is accompanied by certain markers that were clear to the medieval listener but are not always obvious to the modern reader. L.V. Ginzburg’s translation allows inaccuracies, makes many digressions from the original text and paraphrases certain episodes. Naturally, this also affects the descriptions of Parzival’s social roles. Ignoring and neglecting seemingly insignificant markers leads to an inaccurate understanding of the medieval romance. However, to convey all the nuances that are inaccessible to the modern reader would require not so much a more precise poetic idiom, as an extensive historical and cultural commentary, missing from modern Russian-language editions of ‘Parzival’, that would help create the necessary context around the work. The ruler in the medieval novel is the ideal knight, and a knight is always a hunter; Parzival’s transition from one state to another, from one social role to another, is smoothed out in the Russian translation, and the markers that allowed Wolfram von Eschenbach to label each of the social roles more precisely and sharply are lost.

The article introduces ongoing work on a new translation of Shakespeare’s Richard II, and sets out the motivation for this undertaking. This chronicle, the first in the cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays known as the second tetralogy, was written in 1595 when London theatres opened after a two-­year pause due to the disastrous plague. Known primarily for its thematic actuality, King Richard dethroned, the play has been appreciated for its new reflexivity, manifested in the metaphysical style associated with John Donne but first introduced in Shakespeare’s work. Of the two major stylistic planes in Richard II, the “metaphysical” one has proved to be the most baffling for Russian translators, all of whom worked on the play before the decisive turn towards a metaphysical style in Russian verse accomplished by Joseph Brodsky, who was impressed by the English poets and later incorporated it in his individual style. The verbal fluency of the rhetoric of the royal chambers also is not adequately conveyed in the older Russian versions of the play. The manner of the four former translators — Nikolai Kholodkovsky (1902), Modest Chaikovsky (1906), Anna Kurosheva (1934), and Mikhail Donskoy (1958) — is illustrated and analyzed in their stylistic work in the scene (I, 3) when Richard II comes down from his throne to greet his cousin the Duke of Hereford (Bolingbroke). A number of other passages from the first two acts are presented and discussed. To make up for the inadequacy in the major styles of the play a new translation has been undertaken.

Although Francisco de Quevedo’s sonnets, unlike, for example, Shakespeare’s, have not become a fact of Russian culture and literature, the existing experience of translating them is of interest from the point of view of the very possibility of conveying to the modern reader the meaning and pragmatics of the Baroque text. The peculiarities of the Spanish author’s poetic language are associated with the specifics of lyrical subjectivity, which is far from romantic and post-romantic ideas about authorship as a confession based upon personal experience, but is a set of masks or roles that he constructed in accordance with one or another poetic canon. One of these canonical languages was Petrarchism, which largely determined the language of Quevedo’s love sonnets. The novelty of the Spanish Baroque author lies in the fact that, relying on Petrarchist conventions, he subjects them to witty reflection and turns them into the subject of a conceptual game. At the same time, the reflective nature of the sonnet as a Renaissance genre is reduced to the poetic word. The true hero of Quevedo’s sonnets is not himself or even the feeling of love as such, but a conceit (concepto), the pragmatic goal of this kind of poetry is to surprise the reader and involve him in an intellectual adventure. Analysis of two sonnets and their Russian versions (by A. Koss and A. Geleskul) allows us to draw conclusions about different translation strategies (literal and adapting), which nevertheless lead in different ways to the weakening and erosion of the conceit. The advantage of the first translation is its philological precision. The second impresses with its poetical qualities and naturalness. However, in the first case, the endeavor to follow the original step by step leads to overly heavy syntactic and grammatical constructions. This distracts the reader, preventing him from following the sophisticated paradigm of metaphors into which the basic conceit unfolds. In the second case, the intellectual and rhetorical basis of the sonnet, the supporting elements of the final conceit are sacrificed.

The paper examines the first French translation of N.V. Gogol’s novella Viy, published in 1847 in the newspaper Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires (dated December 16, 17 and 18) and then included in the edition published in the same year under the the general title Nouvelles russes. Traduction française publiée par Louis Viardot (“Russian stories. Translated into French, published by Louis Viardot”). The book also includes Old-World Landowners, Notes of a Madman, Taras Bulba and The Carriage. Louis Viardot, in a short preface to the book, admitted that he was assisted in translation by two Russians, whose names he hid under the initials, but who were in fact I.S. Turgenev and S.A. Gedeonov were hidden. Since the extent of the involvement of each of them is unknown to us, but we only know that Viardot himself did not know the Russian language and therefore could only edit the already translated text (or an interlinear translation), the question arises: how adequately could Gogol’s texts be translated with such a triple collaboration and what kind of idea about Gogol did the French reader receive from becoming acquainted with these works. Accordingly, the purpose of this article was not just to compare the Russian original and the French translation on the basis of one specific example, namely, the story Viy, but also to reconstruct and at the same time explain the impression that the story could make when it got into the French context. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that as a result of a double reduction of the fantastic by Gogol himself for the second edition of the novella and, on the other hand, of a straightening of Gogol’s writing by the translators in accordance with the requirements of an elegant style, Viy was perceived as a kind of a paraphrase of E.T.A. Hoffmann, who had already gone out of literary fashion in the 1840s.

Despite the fact that the Russian reception of Charles Dickens and translations of his novel The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to be Published on any Account) has already become an object of research, analysis of translations of the novel adapted for children’s reading is still far from being complete and systematic. The article attempts to compare three translations of the novel by E.G. Beketova, M.I. Lovtsova and A.A. Beketova, published in the first half of the twentieth century and addressed to a children’s audience. While E.G. and A.A. Beketova adhere to the principles of literalism and strive to preserve both the author’s humor and the specificity of the characters, the cuts in Lovtsova’s translation cause a simplification of the images of the novel’s central characters, and the result is an outline of the novel, an adapted and truncated retelling. The translator ignores wordplay, episodes and plot lines that complicate the characters’ images, the mention of David’s unborn sister existing in Betsy Trotwood’s imagination and fitting the old lady into Dickens’ gallery of sensible cranks. A young reader may find such a text easier to cope with, but it is hardly interesting. Both Beketovas’ translations are closer to Dickens’ poetics, which cannot be reduced exclusively to an adventure novel in a melodramatic spirit.

In the following article we shall discuss the first translation into Russian of the “children’s dilogy” by Kenneth Grahame — the collections of stories The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898), first published by L.F. Panteleev in 1898 and 1900 and translated by Alexandra Vasilievna Gol’shtein (under the pseudonym A. Bauler). These books, which brought the author all-English and European fame, had a significant influence on Russian critical and philosophical thought of the Silver Age. In our study we will try to understand what the role of the translator was in that phenomenon and how accurately she managed to reflect the poetics and style of the Scottish author. To this end, we will consider the artistic means by which the translations were carried out, note the successes and failures of the translator — and see how accurately the original texts reached the Russian reader. Particular attention will be paid to those individual decisions — the choice of individual, emotionally charged vocabulary, the attempt to adequately convey the author’s style and poetics, to play up the allusions, reminiscences, quotations, etc. used by him — that turn out to be a success or a failure for Bauler-Gol’shtein, but are equally characteristic in the context of translation analysis and the theory of cultural transfer.

The article provides historical comments to Honoré de Balzac’s article “Des artistes” (1830). It shows the genre complexity of the text, which references the traditions of the rhetorical panegyric, the literary and artistic manifesto and the physiological essay that describes a certain social “type”. The title word “artistes” gets a new, expanded meaning, including in the category of “men of art” also writers and connoisseurs of beauty; this semantic evolution was prepared by the writings of the French Saint-Simonists. The man of art is considered by Balzac not only in the process of creativity, but also in the course of “artistic life”; in this regard, the connection between writers and artists reflected the real cultural changes of the early 1830s, the formation of the “Jeunes-France” subculture which united young painters and poets, admirers of the new Romantic literature. Aiming to affirm the dignity of the men of letters and, more specifically, to obtain a fair remuneration for literary work in the epoch of autonomization of the literary field, Balzac uses the rhetoric of “inspiration” but at the end is forced to call on “artists” to stoically suffer their marginality: this is his interpretation (seemingly the first in print) of the famous slogan “Art for Art’s Sake”.

The paper deals with five translations of Paul Verlaine’s poem “Gaspard Hauser chante” (1873): by Valery Bryusov (1911), Georgy Shengeli (1940s), Wilhelm Levick (1956), Ariadna Efron (1969), Ale­xander Revich (1970s). Russian translators transform the image of Gaspard, which is at the same time one of the author’s masks and a prototype of the Poète maudit, which also appears later in the “Scenario for a Ballet” from Verlaine’s “Memoirs of a Widower” (1886). In the process of russification Bryusov, who considered Verlaine his teacher in symbolism, only slightly changes the French poet’s transparent syntax. Shengeli, practicing a scholarly approach, treats Gaspard in the context of Verlaine’s entire legacy: he was the first to equate Gaspard with Verlaine and he makes him a victim of the century. Levick, incorporating the commentary into the translation of the poem and striving to bring him nearer to the Russian reader, converts Gaspard into a conscious individual. Efron, using the vocabulary and style of Pushkin and Tsvetaeva, offers a Christological image of a poet. Revich’s Gaspard is a sort of social activist, who reproaches humanity for being insufficiently humane. Consequently, the myth of the Poètes maudits is extended from the 19^th century into the future and into Russian literature; the poet becomes even more sacrificial then “The Prophet” of Pushkin. He has a tragic fate, just like the fates of the great Russian poets of the 20^th century: Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak.

The Life of Arseniev has been studied insufficiently and one-sidedly. Although critics praised Ivan Bunin for his stylistically impeccable narrative manner, the novel’s linguistic aspect has never been the focus of analysis. Meanwhile, the protagonist of this Künstlerroman is a writer, whose maturation involves mastering literature and the Russian language in its many varieties. The Life of Arseniev is narrated by the same person but already fully matured. As a fifty-year-old author, Arseniev has learned the secrets of his profession and has become famous. Recollecting in emigration his early life, Arseniev documents the Russian language of the time of his youth, i.e. the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, at the time of the writing being on the brink of extinction as the result of the new Soviet rule and control. In his capacity of Bunin’s alter ego, Arseniev creates vivid individual speech portraits of the characters (the article analyzes four of those) and one collective speech portrait (of Arseniev’s antagonists — the Socialist underground community). These portraits share the common pattern of reflecting the speakers’ personalities through their manner of speaking, while varying the specific techniques of linguistic portrayal. The article pays special attention to the exclamation “Zamolazhivaet!” [It rejuvenates!] used by Arseniev’s father in the course of his drinking sessions: the meaning of this word, the history of its appearance in dictionaries and memoirs, its metaphoric use by Bunin (and Arseniev), and the extent to which all this is reflected in the extant English, French, and German translations of the novel.

The lyrical perspective of Boris Pasternak’s 1941 forty-four lines poem “Sosny” (Pine Trees) is defined by the transition from a familiar, “here-and-now,” forest landscape to a remote “out-there” seascape where the pine trees are replaced with waves. This narrative move derives from the German poetic tradition, first and foremost the song of Mignon (from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) and Heinrich Heine’s lyric about a pine tree in the North dreaming of a faraway palm tree, and Russian versions of this topos (translations, paraphrases and variations on the theme). The paper considers (resorting to the National Corpus of the Russian Language) earlier Russian counterparts of the topos in the texts of Mikhail Lomonosov, Gavrila Derzhavin, Nikolai Karamzin, Vasilii Zhukovsky, Alexander Pushkin and many other Russian poets. The texts feature two structurally as well as semantically different types of anaphoric passages: on the one hand, a static “locational” pattern, beginning with tam, “there,” and on the other, a more dynamic “directional” structure, beginning with tuda (German dahin), “thither.” In the article, Boris Pasternak’s “Pine Trees” are shown to combine and vary elements of both the German, Goethean, predominantly directional paradigm and the Russian, Zhukovskian-Pushkinian predominantly locational one.

The article introduces into scientific circulation two previously unpublished letters from the archive of A.I. Turgenev. Like all letters to and by Turgenev they are remarkable in themselves, and also contain important information concerning the first and second volumes of N.V. Gogol’s Dead Souls. The first letter was addressed to Turgenev by his cousin and manager of his Simbirsk estates, Ivan Semenovich Arzhevitinov, and contains a rather harsh criticism of the newly published first volume of Dead Souls. The peculiarity of this criticism, which would seem to fit into the huge number of already known reviews of Gogol’s poem, is that it was written by a provincial landowner who was offended not because he recognized himself in the characters depicted in the work (as there were many such cases). On the contrary, Dead Souls is criticized by a landowner for whom the life described by Gogol was not an artistic fiction, but everyday prose filled with the noblest aspirations. Arzhevitinov’s judgment on Dead Souls is incorporated into a discussion of what for him were pressing issues: about the situation of obligated peasants, about fires that afflicted entire volosts, etc. Of course, he does not find any echo of these problems in Dead Souls. The second of the letters published here came from the pen of A. I. Turgenev himself and was addressed to his cousin Alexandra Ilyinichna Nefedieva, one of his favorite correspondents. In it, he reports on the second volume of Dead Souls, allegedly already written by 1843, which to a certain extent may change the idea of the chronology of writing and burning of redactions of the second volume. The publication of the letters is accompanied by an introductory article and commentaries.

After Herzen’s refusal to return to Russia and the subsequent deprivation of his citizenship and status rights (in 1851), his name was banned from public mention in Russia. With the establishment of the Free Russian Printing House in London (in 1853) and the appearance of its publications and periodicals (foremost Poliarnaia Zvezda (“The Polar Star”) since 1855 and Kolokol (“The Bell”) since 1857), the ban expanded not only to the physical, but also to the “virtual” presence of the exiled Herzen. The Third Department and other government structures were forced to take extensive and sophisticated measures to keep Herzen out of the socio-political and cultural field. However, after a while, a paradox arises: the absence of Herzen in the public field, but his increasingly extensive presence in government communication, primarily in the document flow of the Third Department, and later in correspondence and personal communication of ordinary people, that is, in fact, in the informal socio-political sphere. Moreover, Herzen’s popularity in Russia in the late 1850s and early 1860s was such that he became not just a political figure, an opposition publicist, but a kind of celebrity, a public figure. The article is largely based on archival data, most of which is being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.

The article is devoted to the reception of Shakespeare’s works in England in the last third of the 17^th century, when Shakespeare’s plays were rewritten for the stage and adapted to the contemporary conditions and rules of English drama. Thomas Otway is considered one of the major translator-interpreters of Shakespeare plays into the language of his own modernity. The article examines how Otway treats the love story of Romeo and Juliet, namely, which elements he rewrites, which are left exactly as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and which are completely removed from the text of Otway’s play. Thus, the adaptation is regarded as a kind of translation within the framework of a single national tradition — from the language of the Elizabethan era to the language of the Restoration. Of particular importance are the changes made by Otway to the final episode of the play (the lovers get a chance to say goodbye to each other before their death, which does not exist in Shakespeare’s play). It is also important to mention that Otway’s play reflects the political situation of his epoch. Otway’s interpretation influenced all subsequent adaptations and European (German and French) translations of the 18^th century.

Charles Perrault’s fairy tales combine archaic plots and the realities of French life in the Louis XIV era, folklore formulas and literary play, reminiscences from ancient literature (Apuleius’ “Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass”, Virgil’s “Aeneid”). Considered as a single text, together they tell the story of girlhood and family life. It begins with an awareness of female (menarche) and male physiology (“Little Red Riding Hood”, “Sleeping Beauty”). Then the heroine has to avoid incest with her father (“Donkey Skin”, “Griselda”). To marry, she has to enter into a rivalry with her sisters (“Diamonds and Toads”, “Cinderella”, “Riquet with the Tuft”) and magically transform herself to seduce the prince (“Donkey Skin”, “Diamonds and Toads”, “Cinderella”, “Riquet with the Tuft”). Then it is necessary to destroy the ogre-mother-in-law (“Sleeping Beauty”) or the husband-killer (“Bluebeard”). If we consider “Bluebeard” from this perspective, it becomes clear that, as in the detective story, the wife, with the help of her sister, sets up the murder of her wealthy husband, presenting the crime as necessary self-defense. Her brothers in the military killed Bluebeard, leaving him no chance of escape. Like the suspense detective plot popular in the mid-twentieth century (Hitchcock, Boileau-Narcejac), the story is told from the point of view of the victim who engages in a duel with the perpetrator. In the verse fairy tale “The Ridiculous Wishes”, in the poem “The Apology of Women” and in the verse moral of the fairy tale “Bluebeard” Charles Perrault engages in ironic polemics with feminists (“précieuses”) and assures us that women command men. In the fairy tales “Diamonds and Toads” and “Riquet with the Tuft” he enters into competition with the late 17th century fairy tale writers (Marie-Jeanne “L’Héritier de Villandon”, Catherine Bernard) who used the same plot. It is possible that in “Bluebeard” he is taking aim at another storyteller, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, who in her youth was convicted for plotting against her husband.

The article considers the wholesale meat market as a persistent background for verbal and visual fashion imagery. This setting is inherently contradictory, as it combines the features of two key sites of industrial modernity, which tend to be seen as unconnected, if not mutually opposed to each other. On the one hand, the meat market, where animal carcasses can be flayed and carved into pieces, bears similarity to the abattoir — a marginal site which in the nineteenth century was removed from Western urban centers for hygienic and moral reasons, yet proved central for shaping modern production technologies and visual regimes. On the other hand, as a place of commerce, the meat market shares some characteristics with a shop window that transforms various materials into commodities and serves as a screen onto which the desires of consumer society are projected. The article focuses on representations of the Parisian central food market, Les Halles, and similar venues situated in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities. The case studies under examination are Emile Zola’s 1873 novel The Belly of Paris; Guy Bourdin’s photographs set in Les Halles and intended for the February 1955 issue of Vogue Paris; and Dora Kallmus 1940–1950s photographic series taken in Parisian abattoirs and meat markets. In all three instances, the meat market becomes both the locus and the object of critical reflection, touching upon such topics as aesthetics and the appeal of commodities, physical vulnerability and mortality, the responsibility of the artist and the audience. While only Bourdin’s photographs feature a literal fashionable display set in a meat market, both Zola and Kallmus draw upon fashion imagery to make a point about the various ways flesh can be commodified.

Gérard Genette (1930–2018) was an outstanding French literary critic who made an enormous contribution to the study of poetics, narratology, rhetoric and pragmatics of literary texts. His three-volume book Figures (1998), as well as some articles, have been translated into Russian, but his book Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation (1987), dedicated to such an important concept as paratext, has not yet been translated. To fill this gap, at least partially, the following publication offers readers a translation of the “Introduction” to this book, where Genette explains in detail what he means by the term “paratexts” and why it is needed. Paratext (French paratexte, from ancient Greek παρά ‘near, around’ + “text”) is a set of boundary elements of a literary text that set the frame for its perception and interpretation; a network of threshold devices and conventions that, whether outside or inside the book, determine how it is read. According to Genette, a paratext is divided into a peritext and an epitext. Peritext is those elements of a paratext that are directly in contact with the text (title, author’s name, genre designation, dedication, epigraph, date, preface, notes, commentary, but also publication data, design elements of the publication, etc.). Epitext is those elements of a paratext that exist separately from the text itself (critical articles, advertising materials, speeches by the author dedicated to this text, etc.). Both of them, together and separately, can form complex mediations between the book, the author, the publisher, the reader; such elements of paratexts as titles, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications form the private and public history of the book. Thresholds provides an encyclopedic overview of the customs and institutions of the Republic of Letters as they manifest themselves at the boundaries of the book.

A review of: Delage-Béland, I. (2023). Les Fabliaux: Fiction, vraisemblance et genre littéraire. Classiques Garnier. 460 р.

A review of: Shaytanov, I.O. (Ed.) (2022). Shekspir U. Sonety [Shakespeare, W. Sonnets]. Aleteiia. (In Russian).