Достоевский и мировая культура: Филологический журнал (Dec 2024)

Concepts of State in the Novel Crime and Punishment: Problems of Intercultural Translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Artistic Language

  • Liudmila B. Karpenko

DOI
https://doi.org/10.22455/2619-0311-2024-4-215-253
Journal volume & issue
no. 4 (28)
pp. 215 – 253

Abstract

Read online

The article deals with the ways of expressing concepts of state in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment and the peculiarities of their reproduction in the translation of the novel into Bulgarian by the poet and translator Georgi Konstantinov. The relevance of the work is determined by the insufficient study of Dostoevsky’s linguistic techniques in conveying the state of the characters and the environment, as well as the peculiarities of translating the concepts of state from Russian into Bulgarian. The problem of translatability of grammar, the dependence of discrepancies between the original and translation on the systemic features of languages is investigated. Research methods: comparative, contextual, structural-grammatical, lexico-semantic. The material is collected from the parallel Russian and Bulgarian texts of the novel and the Russian/Bulgarian subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The author of the article concludes that Georgi Konstantinov managed to convey both the global universal meanings of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment and the individual originality of the writer’s language. At the same time, the study reveals natural discrepancies between the original novel and its translation, which are explained by a number of reasons: 1) partial differences in the linguistic conceptualization of the world in the two languages: the Russian language picture of the world is characterized by objectspatial dominance, spatial models serve as a basis for the design of different types of relations, including state concepts; Bulgarian language focuses on the state as an action or a dynamic characteristic of a person; 2) systemic differences between modern Russian and Bulgarian languages, discrepancies in their grammatical, lexicallinguistic, lexical-semantic resources, which is regularly observed in the transition from Russian impersonal sentences to Bulgarian bipartite or definite-personal sentences, from prepositional-padding combinations of Russian to Bulgarian verb forms; 3) the translator’s skill, the nature of his perception of the content of the text, key and precedent words.

Keywords