Translation in Russian Contexts

Culture, Politics, Identity

Brian James Baer, Susanna Witt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315305332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume represents the first large-scale effort to address topics of translation in Russian contexts across the disciplinary boundaries of Slavic Studies and Translation Studies, thus opening up new perspectives for both fields. Leading scholars from Eastern and Western Europe offer a comprehensive overview of Russian translation history examining a variety of domains, including literature, philosophy and religion. Divided into three parts, this book highlights Russian contributions to translation theory and demonstrates how theoretical perspectives developed within the field help conceptualize relevant problems in cultural context in pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia. This transdisciplinary volume is a valuable addition to an under-researched area of translation studies and will appeal to a broad audience of scholars and students across the fields of Translation Studies, Slavic Studies, and Russian and Soviet history.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315305356.

Part I
Pre-Soviet Contexts

1
Translation Strategies in Medieval Hagiography

Observations on the Slavic Reception of the Byzantine Vita of Saint Onuphrius

Karine Åkerman Sarkisian

DOI: 10.4324/9781315305356-2

In the Saami version of the canonical account of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (beginning in Mark xi 2, Bible of 1713), the donkey on which Jesus rides into the city is replaced by a calf of a reindeer—a more familiar animal to the Saami audience (see Wilson 2008, 75). This can be seen as an instance of domesticating translation (Venuti 2008) or dynamic equivalence (according to Nida 1964), a practice that has been questioned by some scholars. Debating the issue, some critics claim that such an approach results in violations of historicity (see Zogbo, 2011, 25).¹ Nevertheless, similar examples and other evidence of conscious text manipulation suggest this to be a widespread practice among medieval translators. The object of this study, consisting of a hagiographic story of Byzantine provenance in several linguistic traditions, also contains such deviations from the source text, which are often explained as translation errors. The chapter argues that certain deviations can be considered as deliberate choices on part of the medieval translator. Unheeded or neglected translation behaviors become apparent only when collating translations of the same text in different cultural contexts. The study focuses on translation features of the Byzantine Vita (Life) of St. Onuphrius at the time of its reception by medieval Slavs. The main question that will be addressed is whether lexical discrepancies can be considered translation strategies within the transmission of this text into a new cultural context.²

It should be noted that the study of the translation of medieval manuscripts presents a whole set of challenges specific to the period, partly because it is only in exceptionally rare cases that the protograph—i.e., the specific source text of the translation—can be identified and partly because researchers can never be certain that the full range of material is available and that every significant manuscript has been taken into account. Indeed, this is impossible in most cases. Within the Slavic tradition knowing when, where, or by whom a medieval translation was made is the exception rather than the rule. It is also known that a significant number of works were translated more than once, which is the case with the text under investigation. The very nature of manuscripts, which are copied, recopied, and redacted by several anonymous scribes, each of whom leaves subtle clues as to his own linguistic individuality, occasionally contaminating versions of the text by consulting multiple versions of the account, is yet another factor that makes it difficult to determine the archetype (or the “ideal source text”) of a redaction or the original of a translation. This complicates the common notion of a simple opposition between original and translation. In addition, it is not always possible to distinguish clearly between a translation and a redaction of a medieval Slavic text, especially when one takes into consideration the fact that the scribe or editor of the text might have consulted a Greek original for reference. Thus, for the purposes of the present study, a distinction between translation and redaction is not very helpful with regard to medieval manuscripts, in particular within the confines of a specific text tradition.

Since the distinction between a translation and a redaction is often debatable, this study offers a methodological approach that views text reception as a continuous process and translation as a collective and coherent series of manipulations of a certain text with the aim of bringing the narrative to a new audience. Accordingly, the study identifies and explicates lexical features that unify and distinguish manuscript branches at various stages in the cultural appropriation of the Onuphrius narrative up to the seventeenth century. It is important, therefore, to distinguish cases of conscious manipulation from pure misspellings and mistakes. Instead of comparing the source texts’ single representation in a concrete manuscript in the target language, the study takes into consideration evidences of text manipulation on the part of an editor or a translator within groups of text witnesses. The suggested approach is by no means indisputable, but it is a way of identifying features of text adaptation at the various stages of transmission to a new cultural environment.

Several scholars have shown that medieval translators actually did reflect on and articulate the challenges of their work, taking as their starting point different approaches to the word and its dichotomy aisthéon ‘signans’—noéton ‘signatum’ and later glagol ‘word’—razum ‘sense’ (Matkhauzerova 1976; Bulanin 1995, 27; Franklin 2002). In the context of translation this opposition concerned form and sense (i.e., meaning), with the sense being primary. Nevertheless, the greater importance attributed to sense did not contradict the prescriptive word-by-word approach within the ambiance of a prevailing idea of the word as a primordial and eternal concept (Vereshchagin 1997, 37). John the Exarch emphasized that principle in the tenth century:

[…] if the striving for an exact translation of the word leads to a distortion of the meaning of the text, then an exact, literal translation should not be used, but, on the contrary, equivalence of meaning should be preferred to the sameness of the form.

(Matkhauzerova 1976, 33)³

Since the ideal of preserving both form and sense when bringing an utterance to another culture is unattainable, medieval translators were constrained to the practical aim of semantic equivalence, “focusing on how to render individual words, or, at best, small syntactic units” (Franklin 2002, 210, 215).

Within this context, semantic rather than formal equivalence became the central issue in early translating activity. Given the codifying nature of the first renderings from the Greek to the Slavic context, the very first translators had an ambiguous mission: in addition to conveying the true word, Cyril and Methodius had a “term making” assignment (terminotvorchestvo, according to Vereshchagin, 1997). Their followers and subsequent writers, while rendering hagiographic texts, continued this foundational work. Medieval translators encountered a full range of translating challenges: from the rendering of sacred names and abstract concepts to mundane attributes of the source culture, which sometimes did not have an equivalent in the target language.⁴ How did they approach this kind of translation challenge? Can the material studied give the present-day reader any clue to the decision making of a medieval translator?

In studying early Slavic translations, a synthesis of text-critical methods and linguistic analysis has become de rigueur and is considered the most reliable way of resolving complex questions of historical philology regarding the dating and lineage of early translations. Thus questions of attribution—establishing the authorship, authenticity, place, and linguistic affiliation of a translation—have come to dominate Slavic historical philology and to predetermine researchers’ priorities. Mapping linguistic features of a particular region and identifying local vocabulary and the area over which specific lexemes were current provides scholars with lexical data that serves as a reliable tool in the attribution of translations. Taking as its starting point theoretical perspectives developed within contemporary translation studies and based on a previous text-critical study of the Slavic tradition of the Life of Onuphrius, this study focuses on medieval translation in its own right, discussing puzzling textual elements, which may have been overlooked or dismissed in the past as mistakes or occasionalisms.

The Life of the Byzantine St. Onuphrius the Hermit was probably first written in the fourth century, and certainly no later than the first half of the fifth, and was subsequently transferred to all cultures of early Christianity.⁵ “The Life,” which became highly popular throughout the Christian world, probably reached the Slavs in the eleventh or twelfth centuries within the body of hagiographic literature adopted from Byzantium.⁶ The story was obviously very well-liked by the Slavs, as it was copied and recopied as late as the nineteenth century. It takes the form of travel notes made by a certain monk Paphnutius, who recorded his pilgrimage to the desert. His account of Onuphrius is only one of the episodes contained in “The Life,” and Onuphrius himself is one of eight hermits and ascetics whom Paphnutius encountered in the desert. Thus, the Vita hardly corresponds to the established canons of the hagiographical genre; rather, it resembles a sequence of edifying stories from the Skitskii Paterik (The Scete Paterikon).⁷ Indeed, the scholarly literature on the Life of Onuphrius the Hermit repeatedly points out the close connection between certain episodes in it and the stories in the Scete Paterikon. Moreover, it is claimed that one chapter from the Paterikon was interpolated into the Life of Onuphrius. This conclusion, drawn by specialists in the Greek and Latin traditions of St. Onuphrius (Nau 1905; William 1926), is confirmed by the Slavic material (Pak 2001; Åkerman Sarkisian 2007) and is significant for the exposition that follows.

Three narratives of Onuphrius’ Life are known among Slavs: (a) the pilgrimage of Paphnutius (Peregrinatio Paphnutiana)—the primary and the most widespread tale of the saint, (b) the history of his birth and childhood (Legenda)—a secondary and rare construction, and (c) a hybridized version of the previous two, which does not seem to have been preserved in Greek. Unless otherwise stated, reference in this chapter is to the Peregrinatio. To date, over a hundred Slavic manuscripts of the Vita hav e been identified, representing at least three South Slav translations (two Serbian from the fourteenth century and one Bulgarian from the fifteenth century). Even more redactions, including East Slav (Russian, sixteenth-century) revisions, have been established.⁸

Scholars who studied early Slavic translations confirm that the current practice of medieval translations from Greek into Church Slavonic may be characterized as verbatim, producing a text as close as possible to the original (Uspenskii 2002, 56–58). The approach of literal translation is known as kata poda (in Greek ‘following in the footsteps’), verbum verbo, fidus interpres, meta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Double Context of Translation
• Part I Pre-Soviet Contexts
• Part II Soviet Contexts
• Part III Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Contexts
• Notes on Contributors
• Index