Translating England into Russian

The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia

Elena Goodwin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350134010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

From governesses with supernatural powers to motor-car obsessed amphibians, the iconic images of English children's literature helped shape the view of the nation around the world. But, as Translating England into Russian reveals, Russian translators did not always present the same picture of Englishness that had been painted by authors. In this book, Elena Goodwin explores Russian translations of classic English children's literature, considering how representations of Englishness depended on state ideology and reflected the shifting nature of Russia's political and cultural climate. As Soviet censorship policy imposed restrictions on what and how to translate, this book examines how translation dealt with and built bridges between cultures in a restricted environment in order to represent images of England. Through analysing the Soviet and post-Soviet translations of Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne and P. L. Travers, this book connects the concepts of society, ideology and translation to trace the role of translation through a time of transformation in Russian society. Making use of previously unpublished archival material, Goodwin provides the first analysis of the role of translated English children's literature in modern Russian history and offers fresh insight into Anglo-Russian relations from the Russian Revolution to the present day. This ground-breaking book is therefore a vital resource for scholars of Russian history and literary translation.

1

Introduction

Children’s books have always held a special position in Russian literature. For almost a century writing for children was supported and promoted by the state policy aimed at educating and bringing culture to the masses, starting from childhood. In addition, the country was blessed with great talent in this area and a number of great literary figures also wrote for children: Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Daniil Kharms, Maxim Gorky, Samuil Marshak and Korney Chukovsky, to name but a few. Translated children’s literature has occupied a strong place in the system of children’s literature since the early days of Soviet Russia. As cultural and cross-cultural socialization starts in childhood and translated literature provides a wealth of material on the peculiarities of foreign cultures, it seems likely that translated children’s literature plays a significant role in the process of forming perceptions of other lands and peoples. With regard to translated British children’s literature, the way in which the image of England is created helps young readers to form their vision of the country and its culture. This, in turn, contributes to a mutual cultural dialogue and forms the basis for readers’ awareness and an understanding of England from childhood.

This book explores how Russian translations of British children’s literature construct a literary narrative of England and its culture. The scope of analysis of Russian translations spans about one hundred years, covering Russian translations that appeared during the Soviet period (from 1918 until 1991) and the post-Soviet period (from 1992 until 2015). The starting point of the analysis time frame is based on the idea that not until the October Revolution did the art of literary translation and the emphasis on faithfulness receive focused critical and reflective attention from scholars and translators. From then on, translation was seen as a literary form playing a significant role in Russian literature. Indeed, as Korney Chukovsky states in his 1968 book Vysokoe iskusstvo: Printsipy khudozhestvennogo perevoda [A High Art: Principles of Literary Translation], it was only after 1917 that accuracy became a universally acknowledged principle in translation.¹

In general terms, the story of any country takes the form of cultural meanings shared by people and expressed in images, symbols, tales, traditions, events and landscapes.² As far as England is concerned, cultural meanings construct and maintain the representation of ‘the idea of England as an imagined community’, as emphasized in the Parekh Report. This idea is shared by large numbers of native people and foreigners who, without interacting with each other, perceive a similar ‘mental image of [England’s] typical sights and sounds, its customs and habits, the characteristic features of its landscapes and weather, and a sense of what is distinctive about the national character and established institutions’.³ In the phrase ‘translating England’, the concept of England is a broad category, encompassing not just the country but its people and culture. Thus, to analyse how it is translated one needs to set certain criteria. That is when the more focused concept of Englishness – characteristics regarded as English – becomes more effective. In a way, England, as a broader concept, and Englishness can be used interchangeably, as characteristics of English culture, society and a way of life. Thus, cultural meanings, which make up the literary story of England, act as a manifestation of Englishness that at the same time relates to the broad concept of England. Therefore, this book will discuss Englishness when analysing translations of England in Russian children’s literature.

The notion of Englishness is set apart from the notion of Britishness in this book. The two can sometimes become blurred, especially when approached by foreigners, who have a tendency to equate the two ideas when discussing questions of identity in relation to England and Britain. Nevertheless, there is a clear difference. For example, Iain Chambers divides Britishness into two versions: Britishness as ‘Anglo-centric, frequently conservative, backward-looking, and increasingly located in a frozen and largely stereotyped’ perception of English culture and ‘ex-centric, open-ended and multi-ethnic’ Britishness.⁴ I have decided to exclude the multi-ethnic component of Britishness, which is more applicable to contemporary British children’s literature. Instead, the focus of this book is mainly on Englishness, acknowledging that its stereotyped and conservative nature is Anglo-centric. The Anglo-centric essence of Englishness as ‘Merry England’ (meaning ‘a particular Arcadian attitude to the past, prevalent in Victorian and Edwardian times but with roots stretching back to the turn of the 19th century and with continuing power to the present day’⁵) is expressed to a greater degree in the classics of British children’s literature published between the late-Victorian–Edwardian period and the end of the Second World War.⁶

It is this particular Anglo-centrism as ‘Merry England’ that is represented in the Russian translations of British children’s classics discussed in this book. The corpus of English books consists of works published between the late-Victorian–Edwardian periods and the end of the Second World War, as representative examples in which the narrative of England is embedded in the content.⁷ The included texts can be regarded as products of the English cultural context, as they contain descriptions of ‘Merry England’, which explicitly and/or implicitly pertain to a certain time frame: late-Victorian–Edwardian England, as well as England between the First and the Second World Wars. This group of books share common Edwardian cultural features which are easily recognized as manifestations of ‘Merry England’ by readers around the world, including those who have never seen England and base their perceptions on English literature. Moreover, as Rebecca Knuth emphasizes, English children’s books written during the Edwardian period depict an English lifestyle which reflects this epoch and ‘most children’s books of the late 1920s and 1930s can be seen as carrying forward Edwardian attitudes and tropes’.⁸

The Anglo-centric image of England, which is sometimes projected onto the whole of Britain, seems to be widespread in Russian culture and formed through the agency of stereotypes, which facilitate the mythologization of England in the Russian mind. The two stereotypes, widely held in Russian culture, connoting the mythologized image of mysterious England, are the two Russian expressions – ‘dobraia staraia Angliia’ [good old England] and ‘tumannyi Al’bion’ [foggy Albion]. ‘Dobraia staraia Angliia’ is a Russian version of the English phrase ‘Merry England’. According to I. O. Naumova, the Russian phrase is a phraseological calque of the old English expression ‘Merrie Olde England’ and the widespread expression ‘good old times’ which is present in various languages around the world and connotes the idealistic perception of the past.⁹

In Russian popular understanding, the phrase ‘dobraia staraia Angliia’ stands for a conventional image of England of past centuries, symbolizing an island of comfort and calm, traditions and conservatism, law and order, with attributes such as aristocracy and castles, ladies and gentlemen, bowler hats, umbrellas and pipes, afternoon tea and puddings, thatched cottages and roses. The popular symbolic image of the ‘dobraia staraia Angliia’ can also be found in works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, P. G. Wodehouse, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, as well as by such writers of children’s literature as Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, A. A. Milne, J. M. Barrie, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

The other well-known Russian stereotypical expression of mysterious England – ‘tumannyi Al’bion’ – was popularized in poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov and Marina Tsvetaeva. The first line of Batiushkov’s elegy ‘Ten’ druga’ [The shade of a friend], written in 1814 as he was sailing from England to Sweden, reads, ‘I was leaving the foggy shore of Albion.’ Tsvetaeva referred to this line of Batiushkov’s elegy for her poem ‘Ia bereg pokidal tumannyi Al’biona’ written in 1918 and dedicated to Byron.¹⁰ This phrase is a well-known toponym in Russian culture associated with England, and as a metaphor it evokes the image of an enigmatic land wrapped in mist, where King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table once reigned. At the same time, this image is linked in the Russian imagination to an island constantly covered in fog and rarely visited by the sun. Russian nineteenth-century literature offered the image of England as a foggy island shedding not light but melancholy upon the people who lived there.¹¹ On the whole, both Russian expressions create a positive image of England in Russian culture although a negative perception of England among its people endures, a product of the history between the nations. In the nineteenth century this was connected with commerce and foreign relations, when the image of an unfriendly England with a greedy and self-centred business class developed. Moreover, the Crimean War led to the formation of a new symbolic image of England as ‘kovarnyi Al’bion’ [perfidious Albion].¹² This negative, mostly stereotypical, image became entrenched in Russian perception and has reappeared in Russian political discourse whenever relations between both countries take a turn for the worse.¹³

The overall perception has been based on opposing views and constructed via different experiences and media: through political discourses prevalent at different periods in Russian history, through the personal experience of people travelling to England, through cinema, theatre, TV and mass media as well as through various fictional and non-fictional sources. In the process of constructing such a perception, literature has played an important role by creating a mythologized image of England in the corpus of Russian national children’s literature and by introducing British children’s books through translation. During the Soviet period the dominant narrative of this mythologization was political, with state ideology playing a significant role. The post-Soviet period has seen a shift towards the cultural narrative in the mythologization of Englishness. During this period, ideology has still been present, although its nature was modified: the commercial approach to translated literature has superseded the overwhelming influence of state ideology.

Hence, I argue that in Russian translations of British children’s classics the construction of Englishness is, on the one hand, affected by censorship and given ideological interpretations and, on the other, partially Russified and reimagined as ‘dobraia staraia Angliia’. The degree of modification in representing Englishness varies according to changes in the political situation in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia – political ideology playing a significant role in the Soviet Union and commercial ideology prevailing in post-Soviet Russia.

This book will pursue the following objectives. First, to analyse the literary transfer of images of Englishness from British children’s literature to Russian translations during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in order to discover the extent to which these images were preserved, modified or misrepresented in the translated texts. Secondly, to explain the process of translation in connection to Russian society, namely, how the original texts were found, why they were chosen for translation and who translated them. Thirdly, to explore the reception history of the translated books in Russia by emphasizing on critics and media reviews.

Theory

The book draws on several theoretical ideas proposed by scholars in the fields of translation studies and children’s literature (Gideon Toury, André Lefevere, Lawrence Venuti, Zohar Shavit, Emer O’Sullivan and Maria Nikolajeva) that provide a suitable context for analysing the process of translating Englishness and selecting British children’s books for translation. With the focus on the assumption that a different culture is assimilated in translation to some degree, reference is made to Gideon Toury’s arguments, which state that translated texts are ‘facts of target cultures’ and that translations should be studied within the context of the receiving cultures.¹⁴ Moreover, the book draws on the hypothesis proposed by André Lefevere who claims that a different culture is ‘naturalized’ in literary translations.¹⁵ In other words, translations tend to conform more to what the target readers are used to – the literary language and content of the receiving culture. This hypothesis resonates with Lawrence Venuti who emphasizes that foreign texts are ‘often rewritten to conform to styles and themes that currently prevail in domestic literatures’.¹⁶

Theoretical thoughts on translation outlined by Toury, Lefevere and Venuti serve as a justification for the need to look at Russian translation practices, Russian translation norms, translators’ personal writings in the form of memoirs, diar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Transliteration and Translations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Translated literature in Russia: The ‘high art’ of realist translation, censorship and key actors within the field
• 3 Translation of British children’s literature in Russian context: Responses to political and cultural changes
• 4 J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: Censoring images of the British Empire and Edwardian class society
• 5 Translating Rudyard Kipling’s duology about Puck: Empire, historical past and landscape
• 6 A. A. Milne through Soviet eyes: Translating silliness and traditions
• 7 Framing P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins in ideological and cultural contexts: Translating features of English national character
• 8 Re-imagining Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: Images of mythical rural England and the English way of life
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Englishness in Russian literature
• Appendix 2: Canon and classics of British children’s literature (including books accepted as literature suitable for children), published during the late-Victorian period and 1945
• Appendix 3: British children’s classics (and books considered as reading for children) written between the late-Victorian period and the Second World War that were translated into Russian
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page