The article deals primarily with the complex situation of Michel Foucault's Les mots et les choses (1966) being introduced into Russian/Soviet culture (1977). The translation and publication could be treated as a “Soviet miracle”. During the “era of stagnation”, publication without any cuts by the censorship of a book that included striking critical passages on Marxism was an unprecedented event. This happened more than 40 years ago. In the present period, due to a renewed interest in the period of the 1960s–1970s both in France and in Russia, historians, sociologists and philosophers ask themselves how could the book appear in the Soviet ideological and cultural context, who decided to publish it, what was its reception by readers, etc. The author of this article, who was fortunate to be able to introduce Michel Foucault to Soviet/Russian readers and who translated the book (together with V. P. Vizgin), discusses the circumstances of its translation and of how it was perceived in Russia during the Soviet and post-Soviet period. The article lays out the general situation during the Soviet period of a total absence of translations of contemporary Western philosophical literature; points out the features of content and structure of Foucault's book that attracted some Russian/Soviet scholars'; outlines the necessity of developing Russian conceptual languages, especially in the process of translating texts of contemporary Western philosophy and human sciences; and, finally, enumerates some changes that the initial translation of the text underwent in the process of preparing a new critical edition.

The article juxtaposes two translations of Boccaccio's The Decameron — the one by Alexander N. Veselovsky (1891–1892) and the other by Nikolai M. Liubimov (1970). What is unique and noteworthy here is that, over time, the more recent translation neither displaced the older nor lost ground to it; both versions found their proper niches in today's book publishing market and hence, as one might infer, are intended for different categories of reader. Veselovsky, in his translation, keeps to the principle of formal fidelity to the original (‘literalism'): this reveals itself both on the level of certain intra-phraseological units (‘word-for-word' translation) and in preservation of the original syntactic order of the source text. Incidentally, Veselovsky did not attempt to artificially anachronize the language. Liubimov, on the other hand, follows, in the main, the principles of the Soviet school of ‘creative' translation. The language of Liubimov's Decameron is the standard literary tongue of the 19th–20th centuries, which is moderately encrusted with Slavisms; it exhibits no modernizations, nor any particular verbal ingenuities that characterize, for instance, his translation of Rabelais. Unlike Veselovsky, Liubimov did not attempt to create a specific diction for his Decameron. Both translators refrain from re-creating the vast rhetorical array of Boccaccio. Veselovsky, at times, tugs at the language (though not outright violently); thanks to that technique of ‘ostranenie' (defamiliarization), these linguistic displacements, this diction which has no direct analogs in the Russian tradition, he fills the void created by the lack of any counterparts of Decameron in the Russian literary tradition. Yet his action is far from complete; by and large, it is possible to argue that Veselovsky's translation principally differs from Liubimov's in that rather than bringing the source text to the target audience, it brings the audience to the source text.

Since the times of Peter the Great, when secular literature emerged, writers have experienced a lack of the metaphysical language capable of expressing feelings and sensuality. Translators especially confronted this problem, which, paradoxically, by the second half of the 18th century led to an abundance of translated erotic (libertine) literature as well as to various attempts to create love lexicons. In 1768, A. V. Khrapovitsky, a young graduate of the Land Forces Gentry Cadet Corps and later Cabinet Secretary of Empress Catherine II, translated and published anonymously The Dictionary of Love by Jean-Fran?ois Dreux du Radier. In the introduction, he indicated the purpose of the lexicon — to translate the “inexpressible” that love contained, and thus to avoid the many grave mistakes stemming from language insufficiency. Yet the result of Khrapovitsky's labors only remotely resembled the original. The double standard of romantic language and behavior proved alien to the Russian translator, as well as the “hidden agenda” formulas, which one must know how to decipher and which the French lexicon taught to the reader. Khrapovitsky translated the verbal strategy of those who perceived romantic relationships as a battlefield into the sphere of life experience; rather than translating the text, he was transforming French romantic rhetorics into a satirical, epigrammatical worldview more characteristic for the Russian spirit and the Russian tradition. The second part of this study is devoted to the problem of translating libertine novels into Russian. An additional question is posed: why were French libertine authors rather abundantly translated in late 18th c. — early 19th c. Russia, and why was such literature addressed not to freethinkers, featherbrains and debauchees, as one might expect, but rather — as a rule — to sensitive and virtuous people. The last section of the article focuses on the problems of contemporary translations of French erotic prose into Russian. The author faced these problems while working on a translation of The Libertine Art of Life by M. Delon and of a number of French libertine texts included in an appendix to this work. Acknowledgements. The research was conducted with the support of the RFBS grant programme no. “Alexander Pushkin: from polylingualism to translation”.

Although К. Balmont's translations have frequently been the focus of research, including advanced theses, English plays translated by him as yet haven't been studied. The aim of this article is to trace the transformation of Balmont's method of translation — from the early attempts of the 1890s to the mature period of 1910s — by analyzing his draft translation of Romeo and Juliet. Reconstruction of the method as well as scrutiny of the theatrical sources make it possible to argue that A. Tairov's refusal to cooperate with Balmont in staging Romeo and Juliet and Balmont's translation fiasco may be explained by the change in his method of translation (from free — to word by word translation). Analysis of Balmont's draft shows its close connection to a translation of Romeo and Juliet by Apollon Grigoriev. Practically, in some cases Balmont left unchanged A. Grigoriev's phrases that seemed neutral or stylistically unimpor-tant, while in other cases he changed them a little bit to make the result seem closer to the English text. These borrowings made Balmont's translation sound archaic and led to a distortion of the original. The author of the article concludes that Grigoriev's influence and Balmont's abandonment of the method of free translation that he had employed for years prevented him from finding his own intrinsic intonation in putting Shakespeare's tragedy into Russian.

After the 1951–1955 fifteen volume and the 1960 twenty-four volume collected works of Balzac came out, translations from these editions have been reprinted many times, both in new collected works and in stand-alone volumes, yet their quality has never been questioned. These translations are still perfectly readable, but upon comparing them to the originals it turns out that more than once the original has been either misinterpreted or considerably watered down. This article demonstrates mistakes and/or elements lost in translation of several works, namely The Wild Ass's Skin, Melmoth Reconciled, History of the Thirteen, The Illustrious Gaudissart, The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, Father Goriot. These mistakes mainly stem from insufficient knowledge of the historical and cultural background of the Balzacian era. It is due to unfamiliarity with the contexts that houses' walls turn into Parisian outskirts, a jester with a drum is replaced by a mattress and a shed, and Seraphin, the puppet theatre owner, turns into a seraph. In other cases, the realia important for Balzac himself and his contemporaries, such as palingenesia, incredibly popular and on-trend in the late 1820s — early 1830s, or the mules of Don Miguel, that refer both to historical and to literary events, are simply omitted — which makes the translation smoother but less historically accurate. In the mid-20th century, translators lacked our access to Web search and to textual and culturological commentaries by French scholars specializing in Balzac, which is why we have no right to blame them for such mistakes. But noticing those and doing our best to suggest more correct variants is both desirable and necessary.

The article focuses on B. A. Krzhevskii's translation of Cervantes's Exemplary Novels (Novelas ejemplares), which he made at the beginning of the 1930s. This translation conserved the slightly archaic structure of the Russian language of that time, and this aptly correlates with the stylistic features of the original 17th century text. At the same time, we can perceive the limitations of the textual research underlying the translation. By contrast, today extensive new commentaties have enriched our interpretation of Cervantes' text. Over the last 100 years, scholars and commentators have revealed and clarified hidden allusions, “microquotes”, rhetorical and philosophical topoi, and culture-specific concepts: all this allows us to raise the issue of trying to compensate for them by filling in the gaps in the Russian translation. One of the most significant attributes of Cervantine language can be defined as wittiness (ingenio) which in the late Renaissance and Baroque culture had become a matter of special concern. The article deals with two aspects of such wittiness: how Cervantes applies a so called “ready-made” (rhetorical) word in a new context, on the one hand, and how he involves specific elements of the historical, “real” background, on the other (information about individuals, objects encountered in daily life, social or religious practices). In both cases. word-for-word or more equivalent translation runs to risk of being too exotic or even alien for the Russian language. Apparently B. A. Krzhevskii, leaving aside unrecognized allusions, chose the strategy of adapting his translation, which made it sound as more «organic», but which resulted in the loss of some meaningful witticisms.

The Mysterious Island, a novel by Jules Verne, published in 1874–1875, is probably his most famous and most stylistically refined work, a true literary chef d'?uvre. The French author perfectly succeeded here in creating an initiation novel, a literary task he had been trying to accomplish throughout his Voyages extraordinaires series. The article deals with various Russian versions of this novel, from the earliest examples (a translation created in 1874 by Marko Vovchok) up to the translation most frequently published in our time — that of N. I. Nemchinova and A. A. Khudadova (first published in 1957). Some translations remain anonymous. The author examines certain constructions and expressions that can be difficult to translate, analyzes various approaches to conveying the style and language of the source text (for example, choosing between bookish and colloquial style). The author analyzes the problem of contamination of translations from different times, as well as the attitude different translators developed towards the translation of technological terms, which were so important for Verne. Special attention is paid to the way religious themes and images are rendered in translations: the author shows that reduction of such material does not come solely from the censorship of religious themes characteristic for the Soviet period. Such treatment of passages with religious elements leads to considerable simplification of the image of the novel's protagonist, Captain Nemo. The article also discusses an anonymous student's work found in the Internet that contains a detailed analysis of two Soviet translations of The Mysterious Island.

In Elizabethan England, wit was associated with dignity, an attribute of a model courtier, and existed in various speech manifestations, anti-Petrarchism being one of them. During the European Renaissance the sonnet, the most influential genre of love poetry, had flourished for three centuries, and England was among the last to adopt it. This is why Petrarchism was inseparable there from its reverse — anti-Petrarchism — in the ‘poetics of doubleness' (Brooks-Davies). For English sonneteers, the question “how to write?” was invariably transformed into “how to praise?” so that the language of true love would not be tinged with conventional flattery. Sir Philip Sidney was the first to draw on this motif in his witty inversions of the Petrarchan vertical when he toppled over the conventional comparison, and instead of looking for heavenly glimpses on earth found human qualities manifested in heavenly objects. Shakespeare, practically all through his sequence, instead of making fun of conventional praise (as he did so memorably in sonnet 130) explored the new depths of love relations. Among his favorite witticisms was a game of pronouns, when around the word ‘self' he raised a whirlwind of repetitions as if sliding down into inwardness: “…that you were yourself, but, love, you are / No longer yours than you yourself here live” (sonnet 13). This wordplay, demonstrating an uncertainty of one's own identity (practiced later by John Donne), is usually missed by Russian translators, who focus not on the reflective nature of the Renaissance sonnet but transform it into the much later lyrical genre of the ‘cruel romance'.

This paper is based on the opinions of two literary translators, a Russian (Natalia Mavlevich) and a French one one (Sophie Benech), as well as on the personal experience of the author who retranslated from the French into Russian Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac and the first two books of Marcel Proust's novel A la Recherche du temps perdu. Why do translators choose to retranslate literary works familiar to readers in previous translations? First, due to different reasons, translations become outdated sooner than original works. Because of this, each new translation of a work aims to make up skipped words, to correct mistakes and all kinds of flaws found in older versions. Then, the development of literature in the target language sometimes makes it possible to express more precisely in a new translation things that previously were hard to formulate. Next, results obtained by literary scholars, especially through new studies of manuscripts and new commentaries on the texts, are very helpful for making a translation more precise and more adequate. It is important to research in greater depth the historical and literary context of a book to be translated; this kind of study helps impart to translations a greater degree of “literariness”. Finally, and most important, the translator chooses to retranslate a text he/she really loves, notwithstanding the fact that his or her predecessors have already made several versions of the same book.

The article examines six different translations of August Strindberg's short story “Samvetsqval” (Remorse) (1885), namely, two French ones, two Russian ones and one German, published between 1885 and 1919. The focus is put on translation strategies, on the way the author influences the translator's activity, on the relationship between different versions and on the — sometime quite dramatic — changes that text can result when the translation is made not from the original but from a “relay” text — from another translation. In Strindberg's story, the hero, a Prussian officer, orders the execution of French partisans taken prisoner in 1871, is tormented by remorse, becomes mad, recovers his mental health in a Swiss sanatorium and become a convinced pacifist dreaming about a Union of European Nations. The first French translation (1885) was complete, however the second one (1894), made by an Austro-Hungarian countess who published under a pseudonym, omitted half of the story because it was made not from the original, but from an incomplete German version. Nevertheless, Strindberg himself was satisfied with the result, because during the nine years that passed since the publication of the original story he had lost interest in those utopian ideas that had occupied his mind in 1885. Moreover, in the new “decadent” context the accent placed on the individual psyche instead of the pacifist theme seemed to him more appropriate. The Russian translation of Strindberg's story, published in 1919, also takes considerable liberties with the original text: the long humanistic monolog, the “highlight” of the story, is no long pronounced by a priest, but by a woman innkeeper.

In 2017–2018, the first two volumes of Ibsen's contemporary dramas, translated by the author of this article, were published by the AST publishing house. This was most timely, as previous translations dated from more than a century ago. Since then, the Russian language has changed drastically in terms of both syntax and vocabulary; as a result, spectators nowadays fail to feel as if the people on stage are speaking the way they do in everyday life — and this is the requirement for “new drama” that Ibsen himself considered extremely important. The old-fashionedness of the characters' speech, seen as doubly so because of the translation, affects the dynamics of the dialogue and impairs the ability of our contemporaries to perceive such highly important characteristics of Ibsen's language as distinctive speech characteristics of the characters and the use of various language registers — from colloquial language to officialese. Theatre directors naturally feel the need for new contemporary translations. One of the important goals of my new translation was to transmit the comic element in Ibsen, including in the play An Enemy of the People, where I broke with the long-standing Russian tradition of viewing Dr. Stockman only as a brave and uncompromising activist. The so-called keywords, that is, certain key concepts or remarks that might be repeated over twenty times in a play, all in various contexts, pose a special difficulty for the translator, as do Ibsen's own neologisms that usually tend to be both strongly emotion-laden and remarkably polysemic. The article treats in detail the translator's strategy, from posing the task (a full contemporary literary translation, both for reading and for staging, in which the characters would converse as naturally as in everyday life) to making specific decisions.

The article deals with re-translation as exemplified by translations of Paul Verlaine. Within each generation there develops a discontent with previous interpretations of the classics: the language changes, elements of the historical context come into clear focus, various ideological and ethical taboos are lifted. Translation presupposes polyauthorship stretched out over time. This is exemplified by several poems by Verlaine that illustrate three reasons for the re-translation udertaken by the author of this article: firstly, formal technique is no longer productive in translating the poem (“The Autumn Song” / “Chanson d'automne”); secondly, details of the historical background need to be specified (“The noise of heinous drinking houses…” / “Le bruit des cabarets”); thirdly, the translation needs to be brought as close as possible to the original on various levels, including alliteration (“The Art of Poetry” / “Art po?tique”). In the case of “The Autumn Song”, translations by Anatoly Yakobson and Vladimir Vasilyev, which demonstrate various ways to transmit the abundant musicality of Verlaine's poem, are provided for comparison.

Avtonomova, N. S. (2019). After Babel, or On translation of “untranslatabilities”. Shagi/Steps, 5(3), 216–225. (In Russian).

Avtonomova, N. S. (2016). Poznanie i perevod: Opyty flosofi iazyka [Cognition and translation: Experiments in the philosophy of language]. 2nd ed., rev. and enl. Moscow; St. Petersburg: Tsentr gumanitarnykh initsiativ. 736 p. (Humanitas). (In Russian).

A review of: Bagno, V. E. (2016). “Dar osobennyi”: Khudozhestvennyi perevod v istorii russkoi kul'tury [A “special gift”: Literary translation in the history of Russian culture]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. 360 p. (In Russian).

A review of: Trubikhina, J. (2015). The translator's doubts: Vladimir Nabokov and the ambiguity of translation. Boston: Academic Studies Press. 247 p. (Cultural revolutions: Russia in the 20th century).

A review of: Espan', M. (2018). Istoriia tsivilizatsii kak kul'turnyi transfer [Trans. from Espagne, M. (1999). Les transferts culturels franco-allemands. Paris: Presses universitaires de France; Espagne, M. (2009). L'historie de l'art comme transfert culturel: l'itinéraire d'Anton Springer. Paris: Belin; Espagne, M. (2000s). Selected articles]. E. E. Dmitrieva (Ed., Intro.). Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. 816 p. (In Russian).