Supervisors info:
Όλγα Αλεξανδροπούλου, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Ρωσικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας και Σλαβικών Σπουδών, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Summary:
A Feast During the Plague (first publication 1832, written in 1830, further on Feast) is the fourth and the final play in a series of dramatic scenes, as Pushkin called them, for which a more general title Little tragedies has been established in literary tradition. The Feast has not attracted the attention of translators for some time. This is possibly due to Pushkin’s subtitle “from Wilson’s tragedy, The City of the Plague”, which refers to a real literary work of 1816 and indicates the allegedly translational nature of the tragedy. The only two translations of the play into Greek belong to the late XX. Translations of the text into English started to appear at the first third of XXcentury, but they flourished especially in the XXI. In this study, the two Greek translations (Alexandropoulos 2004 [1991], Karatzas 1996) of Pushkin’s work are analyzed along with a sample of five English vesions of it (Werth 1927, Nabokov 1944, Anderson 2000, Falen 2007, Yankelevich 1999, 2020).
The aim of the study is to compare and contrast translation strategies the Greek and English translators utilized to identify techniques which lead to deviation of the translations from the Russian original. The study observes changes of meter/rhythm, grammatical and lexical transformations, differences in conceptual content and style, which are analyzed on the basis of comparative analysis, with reference to typical examples and to the meaning of the rationale of translation choices.
The analysis shows that transferring the meter of the Feast into Greek requires less changes to the structure of the text, something that in English translations is proved to be connected with addition of content words addition. The changes of meter, additions and transformations of lexical items, conceptual content and the style in the translations of the play often contradict Pushkin’s poetic method in the Feast. Some changes are aiming to make the text resonate with the audience of the target-language, although, the shifts introduced by the translators bring in ideas which Pushkin rejected.
The contribution of the study lies in the analysis of distinctive features of the Greek translations of classical Russian literature and their correlation with the English ones, aiming at highlighting how Pushkin’s famous untranslatability is affected by the language of the target text.
Keywords:
translation studies, classical Russian literature, Pushkin, A Feast during the Plague, Greek language, English language
