Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Spelling, Translation and Transliteration
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Reading the Russians, or Translation as Explanation
- 1 Unknown Languages and Unruly Selves: Thinking through Translation
- 2 ‘Representing by Means of Scenes’: Translating Voices
- 3 ‘The queerest sense of echo’, or Translating Imprudent Movables
- 4 Editors’ Choice: Craftsmanship and the Marketplace
- 5 Biographical Writing in Translation, or Variations on the Meaning of ‘Life’
- Conclusion: Only Inter-connect? Translation, Transaction, Interaction
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: Reading the Russians, or Translation as Explanation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Spelling, Translation and Transliteration
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Reading the Russians, or Translation as Explanation
- 1 Unknown Languages and Unruly Selves: Thinking through Translation
- 2 ‘Representing by Means of Scenes’: Translating Voices
- 3 ‘The queerest sense of echo’, or Translating Imprudent Movables
- 4 Editors’ Choice: Craftsmanship and the Marketplace
- 5 Biographical Writing in Translation, or Variations on the Meaning of ‘Life’
- Conclusion: Only Inter-connect? Translation, Transaction, Interaction
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Reading the Russians as a gateway to a vibrant, cultural world was a dominant feature of the early twentieth-century cultural imagination and identity. In Virginia Woolf's words, writing to Janet Case in 1922:
But don't you agree with me that the Edwardians, from 1895–1914, made a pretty poor show. By the Edwardians, I mean Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, the Webbs, Arnold Bennett. We Georgians have our work cut out for us, you see. There's not a single living writer (English) I respect: so you see, I have to read the Russians […] Orphans is what I say we are – we Georgians […]. (LVW 2: 529)
Katherine Mansfield expresses a similar impatient sense of isolation, with no affiliation or home other than with the Russians:
[Shaw's] a kind of concierge in the house of literature – sits in a glass case – sees everything, knows everything, examines the letters, cleans the stairs, but has no part – no part in the life that is going on. But as I wrote that I thought: yes but who is living there – living there as we mean life – And Dostoevsky, Tchekov, and Tolstoi – I can't think of anybody else. (LKM 3: 77)
There was nothing outlandish even in such excessive claims – the era's ambient Russophilia was marked by ‘astonishing hyperbole and […] absurdly exaggerated postulations’ (Rubenstein 2009: 2). Nor was this passion particularly new. Critics trace the ‘true beginnings’ of what was to become known as ‘Russian fever’, which peaked in the 1910s, back to the dawn of the Victorian Age, if not to the Elizabethan era (Cross 1985: 3). The mid-nineteenth century certainly saw a change in pace and perspective as a growing demand for Russian literature reinforced the more established attractions of trade and travel (Cross 1985: 3–52). The potential military and political weight of Russia truly struck home during the Crimean war, and would haunt the national imagination from then on, no matter how alliances and ideologies changed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Translation as CollaborationVirginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014