In Moscow Gostiny Dvor, literary professionals talked about the most famous books of all time and their reception today
Are new translations of classics a sign of a living literary process in motion or a symptom of a culture in crisis? Do they reveal new insights or do they pander to public taste? Do they bring the original work closer or render it more distant? Where does this urge to rejuvenate come from in art? What criteria are applied to evaluate a literary translation? These questions were discussed by professional writers and translators from many different countries, brought together by AWPUR’s International Literary Forum.
The roundtable was chaired by Alyona Karimova, editor of the program for the support of ethnic minority literatures of Russia at the OGI publishing house.
French writer and translator Yves Gauthier is adamant that literary classics continue to live, grow, and change. Dersou Ouzala, the memoir by Vladimir Arseniev, came out in Gauthier’s translation two years ago. The story was first retold in French, in an abridged form, by Prince Mikhail Volkonsky in the 1920s. But the full text, complete with the author’s alterations and commentary, did not appear until the early 21st century.
Gauthier has, inter alia, translated the diaries of Mikhail Prishvin, as critic Irina Barmetova informed those in attendance. Not all the eighteen volumes, of course – only some of it, but there is a chance that the book will be enlarged going forward.
The 300th jubilee of Turkmen poet and philosopher Magtymguly Pyragy is coming this year (Russian readers know him thanks to Arseny Tarkovsky’s translations). Chemen Taganova related how local enthusiasts seek out new, previously unknown works by the Turkmen classic, and young authors translate them into other languages.
“If you ask me whether new Persian-language translations of Russian classics are needed, the answer will definitely be yes,” said Iranian translator and educator Zara Mohammadi. “Our earliest translations were made from an intermediary language, so, for decades, we thought we were reading ‘Leon Tolstoy’. What’s more, the language itself evolves, and this fact fuels interest in the pursuit of literature. Tehran University used to be the only school with a Russian studies department. Nowadays translators from Russian are trained everywhere in Iran.”
We do need new translations, provided they are better than the existing ones, remarked Alexander Livergant, editor-in-chief of the Inostrannaya Literatura journal. As concerns the evaluation criteria, Livergant believes they never change: “Firstly, it’s accuracy, and secondly, good and appropriate Russian. I stress this because translations can often be rough these days.”
“Nowhere is the need for new translations felt more acutely than in theater,” opines Svyatoslav Gorodetsky, Head of Literary Translation at the Literary Institute. “They are working on a new production of Faust now, and they’ve chosen the translation by Boris Pasternak. It is a known fact that Pasternak edited his translation repeatedly. Which is to say that the same person feels differently about a text at different times. Zhukovsky also re-translated many things over the course of his lifetime. An emotional bond with the text is what matters most to the translator.”
The roundtable was chaired by Alyona Karimova, editor of the program for the support of ethnic minority literatures of Russia at the OGI publishing house.
French writer and translator Yves Gauthier is adamant that literary classics continue to live, grow, and change. Dersou Ouzala, the memoir by Vladimir Arseniev, came out in Gauthier’s translation two years ago. The story was first retold in French, in an abridged form, by Prince Mikhail Volkonsky in the 1920s. But the full text, complete with the author’s alterations and commentary, did not appear until the early 21st century.
Gauthier has, inter alia, translated the diaries of Mikhail Prishvin, as critic Irina Barmetova informed those in attendance. Not all the eighteen volumes, of course – only some of it, but there is a chance that the book will be enlarged going forward.
The 300th jubilee of Turkmen poet and philosopher Magtymguly Pyragy is coming this year (Russian readers know him thanks to Arseny Tarkovsky’s translations). Chemen Taganova related how local enthusiasts seek out new, previously unknown works by the Turkmen classic, and young authors translate them into other languages.
“If you ask me whether new Persian-language translations of Russian classics are needed, the answer will definitely be yes,” said Iranian translator and educator Zara Mohammadi. “Our earliest translations were made from an intermediary language, so, for decades, we thought we were reading ‘Leon Tolstoy’. What’s more, the language itself evolves, and this fact fuels interest in the pursuit of literature. Tehran University used to be the only school with a Russian studies department. Nowadays translators from Russian are trained everywhere in Iran.”
We do need new translations, provided they are better than the existing ones, remarked Alexander Livergant, editor-in-chief of the Inostrannaya Literatura journal. As concerns the evaluation criteria, Livergant believes they never change: “Firstly, it’s accuracy, and secondly, good and appropriate Russian. I stress this because translations can often be rough these days.”
“Nowhere is the need for new translations felt more acutely than in theater,” opines Svyatoslav Gorodetsky, Head of Literary Translation at the Literary Institute. “They are working on a new production of Faust now, and they’ve chosen the translation by Boris Pasternak. It is a known fact that Pasternak edited his translation repeatedly. Which is to say that the same person feels differently about a text at different times. Zhukovsky also re-translated many things over the course of his lifetime. An emotional bond with the text is what matters most to the translator.”