Turgenev as Translator

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)It was the well-known Turgenev scholar Mikhail Alekseev who described Turgenev as propagandist for Russian literature in the West,1 but Turgenev's position as Russia's best-known author outside of Russia provided him with the opportunity and the means to serve a two-way role as arguably the most significant mediator of literature between Russia and the West in his own time. And his activities as a translator constituted a very significant element in that mediation. Despite this, the general topic of Turgenev as a translator has still not attracted the attention it deserves.2 Although most (but not all) of Turgenev's translations into Russian have now been republished in one or both of the Academy of Sciences editions of his collected works, almost none of his extensive translations from Russian, which include participation in several volumes of translations into French of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol' as well as numerous volumes of his own works, have been republished. Not only is the sheer quantity of material astonishing, but even compiling a comprehensive list remains a daunting task, given that his precise role is often subject to dispute. On at least one occasion, his name appeared as a translator when he did not do the translation; his acknowledged translations into French were normally published as joint translations, but sometimes his active participation went unacknowledged; it would even appear that, occasionally, translations for which Turgenev was at least in part responsible were accredited in print to someone else. Yet even once this minefield is negotiated and even if his known translations were to be published or republished, we would still not have the complete picture, because a not insignificant number of his translations, including, for example, all his translations from Spanish, are lost.Translations always represent a point of potential friction between the self and the and attitudes towards translations generally reflect the state of the national cultural psyche, something that fluctuates over time and depends also on the value attached in the target culture to the culture from which the translation is being made. No one in Russia doubted the necessity and value of translations into Russian, but the situation among the more established (and insularly self-centred) cultures of Western Europe was dramatically different.3 Turgenev's case is, therefore, particularly interesting precisely because of his unique position as an intermediary between several cultures and as an active translator, including as a translator of his own works.Not surprisingly, in translation as in other areas, successive periods tend to reevaluate the procedures and principles adopted by the previous period. Russia has a long history of translation going back to earliest times and the early nineteenth century was particularly rich, most notably in the translations by Vasilii Zhukovskii. These achievements were then reexamined and challenged by the generation of the 184Os and in this, as in so much else, the leading figure was Vissarion Belinskii.4 At this stage in his life and career, of course, Turgenev was operating exclusively within the Russian cultural context. His engagement with translation theory in the early 184Os comes in the context of his critical articles devoted to specific translations, such as his 1843 review of Fedor Miller's Russian translation of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell:His most extensive comments about the nature of translation are to be found in his 1844 review of Mikhail Vronchenko's translation of Goethe's Faust, in which he discusses the necessary talents of the translator at some length:The desire to be an intermediary is not enough, admiration for a work or an artist is not enough, there has to be an affinity of spirit that is both emotional and assthetic. At the same time, a translation has to function as a work of literature in its own right and in the culture of the language into which it has been translated:If these comments largely echo those of his contemporaries, Turgenev's practice as regards translations into Russian is to be viewed as primarily a private matter; as often as not publication was not the specific intent. …

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