The Means of Analyzing “Strong Literature”

It is a well-known fact that any literary text is a storage of aesthetic and

cultural information, and it also contributes to the transfer of this information from
one generation to another. The article under review is about such “strong” literature
in “other” cultures, and the challenges that a translator might face during conveying
such text from the SL to the TL.

The author draws our attention to the fact that each literary text is highly
capable of generating secondary texts. For example, it can be ancient texts written in
a modern language, or texts translated from one language to another and, in this case,
transferred from one culture to another. In such interlingual literary translation, the
primary task of the translator is “to transfer the aesthetic meaning of the ST in the TT,
allowing the latter to create an aesthetic effect similar to the aesthetic effect of the
ST.” Here the author of the article refers to the research of A. Lefevere, who
considered this process within textual grids. He believed that it is crucial to examine
the place of the ST in the grid of the “source” culture and the possible position of the
translation in the grid of the target (“other”) culture, and the ST and the TT should
occupy quite similar places in the textual grids of the source and target cultures. Only
by considering the cultural grids of both texts one can come to the interaction of texts
in an intercultural space.

Literary texts with stable textual and cultural grids, according to N. Kuzmina,
can be called a “strong literature”. Such texts are usually possess a high energetic
potential, have a large audience, constantly share this energy with readers and receive
it back. As an example, the author refers to the novel “Eugene Onegin” by A.S.
Pushkin, which, undoubtedly, can be considered a national heritage of Russian
culture. As a “strong” text, this novel contains diverse cultural and aesthetic
information. Moreover, for the world cultural space it is not only the text of the novel
(the “strong” text of Russian culture) that is important, but also the personality of the
author and its perception in the “other” cultures. Therefore, it becomes clear why this
particular work was translated into most of the world's languages in a variety of
forms and interpretations.

Analyzing the existing and available translations of the novel “Eugene

Onegin”, the researchers came to the conclusion that most of the mismatches are
found in translations when traditional concepts of Russian culture are translated.

Difficulties arise especially in the fifth, most mysterious chapter of the novel:
the scene of the dream is preceded by the well-known description of winter nature
and the scene of girls’ fortune telling during “Святки” (“Sviatki”). The concept of
“Sviatki”, which is extremely important for understanding of the nature of the
characters and their actions, receives various designations in the TT. For example, the
official English translations of the word «святки» are “Christmas evenings” or
“Twelfth night”, which appeared from the Catholic tradition.
 At the end of the article the author emphasizes again that a certain semantic,
cultural and aesthetic information asymmetry in the translations of any ST will
always exist due to the differences of cultural worlds of the ST and the TT.