On the Translation of Nikolay Gogol’s Conceptosphere Units: “Bogatyrstvo” or “Heroism”?

Abstract

The translation of Nikolay Gogol’s legacy into foreign languages is traditionally associated with a number of difficulties, ignoring which leads to a distortion of the idiostyle of the classic. The article defines the main reason for the distance between Nikolay Gogol’s works and their foreign transcriptions. It lies in the translator’s indistinguishability of those original writer’s concepts, which are built on the basis of national-patriotic constants and supplemented with semantic stresses that are priority for Gogol the Christian. The argumentation of the proposed thesis is carried out in the article in stages. The first stage is connected with the reconstruction of the “core” of Gogol’s concept “Bogatyrstvo” based on the material of “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” and “Dead Souls.” The second stage is the semantic volume of the “core” of Gogol’s concept “Bogatyrstvo” and the ways of its exposition in foreign translations. It turns out that the reduction of the essence of the author’s concept of “Bogatyrstvo” proposed by the majority of translators to the culturally neutral category of “heroism” is irrational and superficial. The author of the article proposes transliteration of Nikolay Gogol’s conceptosphere units as a solution to the problem of its untranslatability.

Keywords

• gogol
• translation
• concept analysis
• conceptsphere
• cultural concept
• individual author’s concept
• bogatyrstvo
• bogatyr
• “dead souls”