Metaphysics in Notes from Underground and Translation Difficulties from Semantics to Grammar

Abstract

The article investigates several excerpts from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and twelve of its English translations to consider the problem of equivalent translation of Dostoevsky’s works. The analysis focuses on fragments linked with the anti-axiologemes zlo (evil) and zlost’ (anger, spite, malice, wickedness) and with allusions to St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. Rendering these fragments correctly has crucial importance for preserving Dostoevsky’s vertically structured tri-partite universe where the human being is connected simultaneously with God and with other people, and none of these ties can be broken without detriment to the other one. When human beings’ tie to God is severed, humans cease having agency and free will and transform into puppets at the mercy of impersonal and unknowable forces; such a puppet also has no responsibility for its own actions. This is the world of severed connections between people who are no longer capable of truly free action or of meaningful interactions. In Dostoevsky, this is the world of the “environment” where human beings are completely dependent on society. When we are dealing with literature in translation, it also means that the protagonist’s situation is no longer universally applicable to any person at any time, and instead, this person becomes the product exclusively of their own time and their own society. Since equivalent translation entails “fully rendering the denotative contents of the original,” research aims to see whether translators succeeded in fully rendering the original semantics as well as Biblical and theological allusions that had been identified by Dostoevsky’s contemporaries even in the censored version of Notes from Underground.

Keywords

• equivalent translation
• skopos theory
• natural theology
• st. thomas aquinas