Contexts, subtexts and pretexts: literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia

摘要

The book under review comprises the papers that follow: Charles Sabatos in the opening paper on "The Boundaries of Milan Kundera's Central Europe' (pp. 19-31) considers the work of Milan Kundera and especially his ideologically charged self-translations. This is presented as a struggle against those who wanted to use his work for their political aims (p. 30). A rather interesting contribution by Vitaly Chernetsky offers a survey of literary translation in Ukrainian culture (pp. 33-53). Although there were periods when the publication of translations into Ukrainian was forbidden (the ban survived until 1905), translation into Ukrainian and Translation Studies evolved more or less successfully resulting in translations by Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, Panteleimon Kulish, Lesia Ukrainka, and many others. It is absolutely worth mentioning that the very first book on translation theory published in the Soviet Union in 1929 was Teoria i praktyka perekladu ( = Theory and practice of translation) by Ukrainian specialist Oleksandr Finkel (p. 45).