The Epigraph to “Forest and Steppe” by Ivan Turgenev: Conveying the “Emblematic” Worldview in the Tradition of Translation

Abstract

The article focuses on the reception of Russian classical literature translations in the English-speaking culture. The research was carried out on the material of three existing translations of ‘Forest and Steppe’ by both Russian and English translators published in 1895, 1955 and 1967. The main objective of the research is to determine the difficulties translators of Russian literature of the 19th century could face in the case of Turgenev's epigraph to ‘Forest and Steppe’. The tasks of the study were to define and describe the peculiarities of conveying the epigraph’s vocabulary, to outline the group of the most important keywords of the text, to recognize and describe discrepancies in their translation, to indicate why the chosen option is possible or impossible in the translation of Turgenev’s text. The study showed that Turgenev's worldview was formed under the influence of the culture of ‘rhetorical word’, and the epigraph to ‘Forest and Steppe’ proves it. The epigraph consists of a chain of symbolic images that add up to a single picture. The writer's worldview determined the style of the epigraph, the choice of vocabulary, and the composition of the text. For translators, the main difficulty at the lexical level lies in the fact that they often choose words that carry a greater emotional load than Turgenev’s vocabulary, and also introduce tropes, absent in the original, into translations. On the one hand, the translations create a realistic picture, in contrast to Turgenev’s symbolic landscape, on the other hand, the atmosphere of the text, reflecting the personality of the writer, is destroyed. The translations mirror profound changes that took place in the 19th–20th centuries in the European worldview.

Keywords

• translation
• russian classical literature
• english language
• turgenev
• “a sportsman’s sketches”; epigraph
• worldview
• emblem
• symbol