Susanna Witt, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stockholm University

2008-2013

The aim of the project was to establish translation as an object of research whithin studies of Soviet culture, particularly of the Stalinist period. The heterogeneous functions of literary translation in the totalitarian context lend it crucial importance. Translations into Russian were to contribute to the creation of a global socialist realist canon as well as a Soviet canon of "representative" expressions of the various nationalities cultures of the Union, while translation, inofficially, also became a haven for unpublishable authors.

A translation, having at least two authors, is an ambiguous text which brings questions of authorship and responsibility to a head. A hypothetis of the project was that translation activities in the Soviet Union would actualize problems pertaining to agency (of translators, authors, editors etc), which could challenge the static picture promoted by totalitarianism theory. The intention was to investigate practices which contributed to the relativization of authorship, as for example the use of interlinear trots (podstrochniki). The focus of the project was on discourses concerning the practice, on the one hand, and on different types of translation, representing various distance between source and target text, on the other.

Results

The project has drawn the contours of the research field "translation in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist cultural context" on an international level, and contributed to the foundation of a Soviet translation history. It has pointed to the significance of integrating descriptions of intra- and extra-union translation, as the same agents were often active in both contexts. A base of archival documentation (amounting to about 3000 sheets) pertaining to the Soviet Writers' Union (in particular, the Translators' Section and the Nationalities Commission), publishing houses and individual translators has been retrieved from the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI) in Moscow. The material gives a picture of the organizational activites of the translators' corporation from the early 1930s and their subsequent incorporation into the Writers' Union, involving issues related to the professionalization of the translators and their positioning vis-à-vis the writers. The documentation details the development of translation activities in different parts of the Soviet Union and the problems and opportunities facing various agents of translation. Here, indirect practices feature promintently, revealing a range of strategies on the part of nomial translators as well as authors and translators of the mediating texts. Some important archival documents have been published as appendices to my articles and I intend to continue publishing such material accordingly. This part of the project will have a broad impact, as the institutional history of Stalinist culture still remains largely unwritten.

Through my participation in national, Scandinavian and international conferences and international publications, the project has established Soviet translation history as a specific object of research whithin the field of Stalinist culture. Simultaenously, the Soviet case has been made visible in the context of Translation Studies, within which Russia has traditionally been neglected. An extensive, international, network of scholars in both fields has been established with a view to further collaboration.

Another important outcome of the project is the international conference "Translation in Russian Contexts: Transcultural, Translingual and Transdisciplinary Points of Departure", funded by RJ and VR and scheduled for 2-7 June, 2014, at the Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. By bringing together internationally leading scholars in the fields of Slavic Studies and Translation Studies, it aims to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries in order to achieve new conceptualizations of the practice, theory and history of translation in Russian contexts, as well as to contribute to theoretical understandings of translation and cultural exchange in general.

The two most important publications of the project are "Arts of Accommodation: The First All-Union Conference of Translators, Moscow, 1936, and the Ideologization of Norms" and "The Shorthand of Empire: Podstrochnik Practices and the Making of Soviet Literature." The first one sheds light on the little known First All-union Conference of Translators held in January 1936 -- at a watershed in Soviet culture of the 1930s, marked by the establishment of the Committte on Arts Affairs in December 1935 and the subsequent campaign against "formalism in the arts" on the eve of the Great Terror. Focus is on the formation of Soviet translation ideology as it emerges from the archival material of the conference. Special attention is paid to the operational value and varying content of such concepts as "literalist" vs. "free" translation and the role of translations in forming the "national cultures" as an ambivalent project situated in a field of tension between Stalinist nationalities discourse and "bourgeois nationalism" (as a latent threat). Appended to the study is the draft resolution of the conference in original and in English translation. The article "The Shorthand of Empire: Podstrochnik Practices and the Making of Soviet Literature" highlights the role of indirect translation in the construction of a Soviet literary canon. The process of making mutually accessible the desired literary output of the peoples of the Soviet Union was often hampered by lack of language competence among translators. The use of intermediary texts, especially podstrochniki (interlinear trots) was ubiquitous. Deemed unsatisfactory "in principle," it was tolerated as a "temporary means," but surfaced regularly on the agenda of the concerned bodies of the Writers' Union. Drawing on archival material, this article provides a microhistory of the podstrochnik through an analysis of discourses on the topic from the 1930s up to the 1960s. These discourses provide a peephole into the manipulative techniques at work in the shaping of Soviet literature as a multinational product, operating at the intersection of institutional and individual initiatives. Moreover, the discourses were important in themselves as they produced "authenticity" and lent some legitimacy to the practice. Appended to the article is a 1940 draft resolution on the regulation of translations from the literatures of the peoples of the USSR.

New research questions generated by the project concern, for example, the translators as agents. Who were they? Which were their cultural contexts? What kind of identities were formed in their settings? What kind of networks did they establish across the Union? How did they contribute to maintaining cultural continuity? And if translation for many of them was an erzats activity for original literary creation, shouldn't we approach translated literature on the same premises as original literature, that is analyzing it in the context of the target literature as a whole?

Publications

Witt, Susanna, “Between the Lines: Totalitarianism and Translation in the USSR” in: Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Brian James Baer, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011: 149–170.

Witt, Susanna, “Translatio imperii: aspekter på nationalitetsöversättning under Stalintiden” in: Litteratur i gränszonen: transnationella litteraturer ur ett nordiskt perspektiv, eds. Christina Kullberg & Elisabeth Bladh, Falun: Högskolan i Dalarna, 2011:  35–52.

Witt, Susanna, “Totalitarizm i perevod: kontekst Dzhambula” in: Dzhambul Dzhabaev. Prikliucheniia kazakhskogo akyna v sovetskoi strane [ Dzhambul Dzhabaev: The Adventures of the Kazakh Bard in the land of the Soviets], eds. Konstantin Bogdanov, Riccardo Nicolosi, Iurii Murashov,  Moscow: NLO, 2013: 267–286.

Witt, Susanna, “Arts of Accommodation: The First All-Union Conference of Translators, Moscow, 1936, and the Ideologization of Norms” in: The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia ( Russian Transformations: Literature, Culture and Ideas, vol. 5), eds. Leon Burnett & Emily Lygo, Oxford etc.: Peter Lang, 2013:141–184.

Witt, Susanna, “The Shorthand of Empire: Podstrochnik Practices and the Making of Soviet Literature,”  Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the post-Soviet Space, vol. 14, no. 3, 2013: 155–190.

Witt, Susanna, “Byron’s Don Juan in Russian and the ‘Soviet School of Translation’” in: Translation in Russian Contexts, special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies, eds. Susanna Witt and Julie Hansen, John Benjamins (submitted, 29 p.).

Witt, Susanna & Julie Hansen, “Introduction: Translation in Russian Contexts” in: Translation in Russian Contexts, special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies, eds. Susanna Witt and Julie Hansen,  John Benjamins (forthcoming, 5 p.).

Witt, Susanna, “Translation and Intertextuality: Byron’s Don Juan in Russian.” Article in progress intended for The Slavic Review (40 p.)

Links:

“Translation in Russian Contexts: Transcultural, Translingual and Transdisciplinary Points of Departure” (conference call for proposals)
http://www.ucrs.uu.se/digitalAssets/183/183524_cfptranslationrussiancontexts11sep.pdf

Witt, Susanna, Bibliography
http://katalog.uu.se/empInfo/?languageId=3&id=N2-838_2