The poet faces a number of challenges: he is reading an unpublished work that he has written out in a notebook. He is also unknown and unestablished, as is shown by his lack of a name in the story. While Pavlova was not in exactly the same situation, she understood the difficulties of being taken seriously as an artist and had to contend with the added obstacle of her gender. Both the poet in A Double Life and Pavlova experience a lack of appreciation for their creative translation work. In fact, Pavlova introduces the poem in such a way as to minimize the amount of credit given to her by the reader. She presents what is in fact her own adroit translation of Schiller as her fictional character’s work and even interrupts his reading by shifting the narrative focus onto the audience and its response.
At this key moment in Cecily’s life, Pavlova draws attention to what Lawrence Venuti has termed the “translator’s invisibility.”13 The effect of a fluent translation is often to hide the work of the translator. Yet by examining the work of translation, we can recover a further creative layer to a work and shine a light on the different cultural contexts in which it is received.
NOTES
1.Karolina Pavlova, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow and Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1964), 231–307.
2.See, for example, Jehanne Gheith, “Women of the 1830s and 1850s: Alternative Periodizations,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 85–99.
3.“Dvoinaia zhizn’. Ocherk. K. Pavlovoi.,” “Literaturnaia letopis’,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia, no. 87 (1848): 2.
4.Baron Rozen, “Dvoinaia zhizn’. Ocherk. Soch. K. Pavlovoi.,” “Kritika i bibliografiia,” Syn otechestva, no. 5 (1848): 1.
5.Baron Rozen, “Dvoinaia zhizn’. Ocherk. Soch. K. Pavlovoi.,” 3.
6.Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing 1820–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 41.
7.“Dvoinaia zhizn’. Ocherk. K. Pavlovoi,” Sovremennik, 47.
8.V. Belinskii, “Vstuplenie”, Fiziologiia Peterburga, ed. Nikolai Nekrasov (St. Petersburg: Bookseller A. Ivanov’s Publisher, 1845), 26.
9.Diana Greene discusses this in Diana Greene, “Gender and Genre in Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life,” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (Autumn, 1995), 572.
10.Brian Baer, Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 90.
11.Daria Khitrova, “Neizvestnyi stikh Baratynskogo,” Tynianovskii sbornik (2006): 12:210.
12.Diana Greene, Reinventing Romantic Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 36.
13.Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995).
THE RUSSIAN LIBRARY
Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski
Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski
Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen
Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson
City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov, presented and translated by Peter France
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Sisters of the Cross by Alexei Remizov, translated by Roger John Keys and Brian Murphy
Sentimental Tales by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk
Redemption by Friedrich Gorenstein, translated by Andrew Bromfield
The Man Who Couldn’t Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Marian Schwartz
Necropolis by Vladislav Khodasevich, translated by Sarah Vitali
Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage: Two Novels, by Yuz Aleshkovsky, translated by Duffield White, edited by Susanne Fusso
New Russian Drama: An Anthology, edited by Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt
A Double Life Page 14