National Identity in Literary Translation

Chu-ching Hsu explores how language and national identity are expressed textually in translations and how Taiwanese translators deal with the dialect and colloquial speech in the source and convey it into the target language made in different periods. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its Chinese translations rendered by different translators and published in Taiwan from 1950 to 2016 were chosen as the corpora for analysis.

In their chapter Oleksandr Kalnychenko and Nataliia Kalnychenko deal with the national self-image in Ukrainian translations of a romanticized historical novella Taras Bulba of the Ukrainian-born writer Nikolai Gogol, in which the author is stylistically oriented to the language coloring of Ukrainian folk epics and which exists in two versions, Ukrainophile 1835 version and Russified version of 1842. The analysis of eleven translations of the second version made at different times at different parts of Ukraine by the translators of different ideological stance has shown that the national self-image is always taken into account by a translator.

Mariya Kochur’s study presents the newly found archives including Hryhoriy Kochur’s correspondence with Eaghor Kostetzkyi, that partially reflects the overall picture of relations between Ukrainian writers and translators with the representatives of the Ukrainian culture working abroad. Based on the letters dated 1967–1972, the study focuses mainly on the support, exchange of creative ideas, new translations and books.

Lada Kolomiyets’s study presents an international project dealing with the English translation of the entire labor camp poetry collection by Hryhoriy Kochur, The Inta Notebook. Although printed only in 1989, the first and the only book of Kochur’s own verses, written from 1945 to 1953, nevertheless, did not become obsolete in terms of its poetic and stylistic diversity by the time of its late publication.

Lesia Kondratiuk and Uliana Zhornokui focus on the theoretical publications of Hryhoriy Porfyrovych Kochur, which are of considerable interest not only for historians of translation studies, because the thoroughness of the issues and their relevance testify to the fact that the development of the history of Ukrainian artistic translation at that time goes far beyond Europe.

Mariia Kravtsova analyses William Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear and its Ukrainian translations by P. Kulish, P. Myrnyi, M. Rylskyi, V. Barka and O. Hriaznov. The notion of ingratitude and peculiarities of its reproduction in the Ukrainian translations are presented in the study as it constitutes the key motif of the tragedy along with the another important motif of infertility.

Nur Zeynep Kürük analyses the historical process of the Turkish translation of The Turkish Ordeal by Halide Edib, which was rendered by the author herself, however, with the omission of a considerable part of the content. Her severe criticism of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is considered to be the most important reason for her non-translation, but Halide Edib’s nationalist emphasis on the minority issues and her rather ‘forthright’ personal opinions were also lost or toned down in her self-translation.

Another part of the volume, authored by Halyna Kuzenko, deals with the semiosphere of the Ukrainian baroque, its role in national literature development. One of the main features of the Ukrainian Baroque semiosphere is the synthesis of different types and genres of creativity. More developed and detailed genre and thematic classification of poetry of the Ukrainian Baroque includes four groups: poetry of the spiritual, etiquette, social-political and individual life.

Arkadiusz Luboń’s contribution focuses on a variety of textual changes introduced in H. P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction translated into Polish at the time of the People’s Republic of Poland. Polish culture in the period 1952–1989 remained under the strong influence of governmental propaganda and censorship institutions that verified all the texts printed in Poland, including both original works and translations. Therefore, the image of United States described in Lovecraft’s short stories published in popular Polish magazines (mainly Przekrój and Ty i ja) was adjusted to officially approved and promulgated vision of American state and society.

Svitlana Lyubymova analyses the interpretation of the sociocultural stereotype of a ‘flapper’ in a newly published Ukrainian version of Fitzgerald’s book The Вeautiful and Damned and the original text of the story Offshore Pirate. The adequate interpretation of the stereotype is based on empirical determination of its meaning on pragmatic background of the utterance with consideration of historical and cultural context.

Jun Mita examines a Belgian symbolist writer, Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898), who wrote many literary works on the culture of Flanders, which were a big success in France owing to their northern exoticism, the so-called ‘mythe nordique’ (‘northern myth’). The analysis of his last novel, le Carillonneur (1897) considers what Rodenbach emphasizes as Flemish identity in his text.

Yulia Naniak in her study aims at providing a short summary of the cultural aspect of the history of Ukrainian, British and American translations of J. W. Goethe’s tragedy Faust. The process of introduction of this work into target cultures was different because of cultural, religious and socio-political background in these countries. The impact of the translated works on the target cultures was also different depending on the time of its creation and they had influence on Translation Studies methodology development.

Fatemeh Parhamexamines a case of Iranian immigrant literature, Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America, translated from English into Persian, to see how identity concerns were reflected in the translation as compared with the original book. To this end, references to identity were marked based on Smith’s ethnic model of national identity and were examined for any change in the Persian translation.

Nataliia Pasenchuk considers problematic aspects of cross-cultural communication in the context of specific cultural features peculiar to a certain nation. The study illustrates the importance of a knowledge of the communicated culture. Special attention is devoted to the translation of drama as an activity demanding specific strategies. The analysis of problems in translation is based on the examples taken from the Ukrainian and Russian translations of the English drama.

Halyna Pekhnyk in her chapter makes an attempt at a contrastive approach to evaluate the lexical, stylistic and syntactic levels of original works by Hryhoriy Kochur and his translated works, aimed at tracing the poetic and translation techniques characteristic of his manner as a poet and translator of poetry, identifying whether and how the original poet’s personality was reflected in his work as a translator. Specific sets of vocabulary and images characteristic of either original poetry, or translated one, or both are detected.

Valentyna Savchyn explores the interplay between the Self and the Other through a case study centered on The Seven Signs of Lion, a 2016 novel by Michael Naydan, and its Ukrainian translation. The central issue under scrutiny is the image of Ukraine portrayed by the American author and mirrored by the Ukrainian translator. The latter actually deals with the image of the Self and has to maintain a balance between fidelity to the author and the expectations of the reader who already has a high degree of cultural competence.

Andrea Schäpers analyses Heinrich Heine’s Harzreise, where he expresses his annoyance about the political and social conditions in the Germany of the Restoration period through verbal attacks and his characteristic linguistic creativity. It is interesting to review the Spanish translations of this work to observe the treatment that translators give to the cultural markers and the connotative load they transmit and in what way they can portray the image of Germany that Heine intended to convey.