Article
Переводческий комментарий как техника эскорта русского имени в англоязычную культуру: на примере английской версии эпистолярных мемуаров «Двадцать писем к другу» Светланы Аллилуевой (1967)
The article examines translator's notes to fiction at large and epistolary works, in particular, as exemplified by Twenty Letters to a Friend by Josef Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. Written in Russian in 1963, the epistolary memoirs were translated into English and published in New York by Harper Row Publishers in 1967, thereby becoming accessible internationally for an 'alien' Anglophone culture. Rendering into English appeared to have washed out some emotive and attitudinal subtleties - meaningful but barely perceptible within 'alien' social, cultural and linguistic setting; specifically those which bore associations with Svetlana Alliluyeva's childhood and her family pet name Setanka. Such associative imagery would not routinely transmit between languages. Doing so necessitates translator's notes or comments treated throughout the paper as a special technique - translation escorting device.
The description of Polovtsian-Russian contacts― embodied not only in constant lesser and greater military conflicts but also in peace treaties, military-political alliances, inter-dynastic marriages, family ties, and finally, simply in personal relations― occupies in the oldest Russian chronicles devoted to the pre-Mongol period a significant place.The breadth of coverage is barely less than that devoted to the history of the Riurikid clan itself. However, the modern reader of the Russian chronicle, having become interested in the history of Russo-Polovtsian interactions, comes up against two partly discouraging, partly disorienting circumstances. On the one hand, this history, for all its eventfulness, gives the impression of something monotonic and undifferentiated: over the course of a century and a half Polovtsian invasions and answering campaigns of the Russian princes are recorded in the sources so frequently that it is difficult to detect any indication of intensification or weakening of military conflict. One is struck by the similarity of those events which fall at the boundary between the 11th and 12th centuries and those which occur a bit more than a century later. In the first as in the second of the indicated periods, we learn about the alternating success of Russians and Polovtsians in battles not far from Pereiaslavl’, about the capture of Russian princes by the nomads, about the fact that another prince marries his son to a Polovtsian woman, about flight—successful or unsuccessful—of yet another Riurikid to the Polovtsy
This study focuses on the interaction between Russian princes and nomadic Cumans (Qipčaqs, Polovcians). The starting point of our work are names and family ties of individual Cumans captured in the oldest Russian chronicles which represent "minimum quanta" of the historical information. N. M. Karamzin in the notes to his History drew attention to the fact that some of the names of the Cuman families representatives are obviously associated with Russia. These "Russian" names, in our opinion, are the most important indicator of the cross-dynastic interaction, contacts between Russia and the nomadic world. What is the composition of the corpus of Russian names of Cuman elite representatives? In essence, it consists of only a very limited number of anthroponyms: Yuri (George), Daniil, Roman, Gleb, Yaropolk, Davyd (?), Vasili. It is crucial that all of these names are regularly used as dynastic by the Rurikids in the 11th — beginning of 13th century. Most of the names, borrowed by Cumans from Russians, are Christian names. At the same time attention is drawn to the non-trivial distribution reflected in the information of sources; while discovering Christian names of some representatives of the highest Cuman nobility, we do not find any mention of the fact that any of the owners of these names, their fathers and other close male relatives took baptism. On the contrary, they are consistently characterized as pagans. Moreover, ancient chronicles contain no reports of Cuman princes taking baptism until the beginning of the Tataro-Mongol invasion. Interestingly, Christian names of those few Cumans of whose conversion we can speak more or less confidently cannot be found in any records, whether it is a Cuman wife of a Russian prince, an anonymous monk of Kiev-Pechersk Monastery, an author of an inscription on the church wall or a powerful Cuman Prince, who was baptized on the eve of the Battle of the Kalka. In our work we have sought to demonstrate that the cause of the appearence of Russian names in this environment is a cross-dynastic, intergenic anthroponymic communication, a desire to consolidate the alliance with the Russian princes, but not a conversion of the male representatives of the Cuman elite. The set of "Russian" names used by Cumans allows us to determine the circle of their "anthroponymical donors" among the Rurikids and identify a number of rules and laws on which this communication in the language of names was carried out.
The paper revisits the topic elaborated in the earlier Translation Studies serial issue and suggests a diachronic approach towards reference in the interlanguage translation from within the psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics perspectives. Reference viewed as the universal steering mechanism behind the translation process per se is believed to enable the translator's mental operations. This fact was implicitly evidenced in the respective notes by antique texts' translators who extensively reflected on their rendering of those texts into modern languages, including Russian. Source-text analysis against target language texts favored the translators' viewpoint on intricate and referentially opaque text-reality relations whereby such reality overlaps irreality comprising coexisting human beings with imaginary characters, mythical heroes, as well as real-life and fabled objects and events reflected in the source-language texts generated in high antiquity.
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