Translation as CollaborationVirginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky
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About this book
Studies the poetics of co-translation in the context of British and European modernism
- Explores the impact that translating from the Russian had on these individual writers as well as on the shaping of modernist poetics in general
- Feeds into a recent renewal of interest in the intense era of Russian fever in the early 20th century
- Focuses on the processes of translating including negotiations with style, voice, and textual rhythm
This study focuses on the considerable but neglected body of works translated by S. S. Koteliansky in collaboration with Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. It provides close-readings and broad cross-cultural contextualisations to assess the influence that translating from Russian had on the individual writers, as well as its resonance within the dynamics of modernist writing. Claire Davison shows that, read as an oeuvre, their various co-translations shed light on how their own creative vision was evolving, particularly through explorations of voice, consciousness, gender and polyidentity. And their co-translating ventures enriched their responses to the great classics but also invited innovative dialogues with other genres: critical essays, biography and early-twentieth-century writing from Russia.
The focus here is on co-translation as praxis. Looking specifically at the immediate post-revolutionary and post-war years, when political, ideological and aesthetic interests were so intertwined, the book examines the cultural and historical dynamics of translation, which reveal a clear interface between literary creation, textual production, publishing networks and the literary translator.
Reviews
Professor Davison looks with meticulous and brilliant attention into what joint literary translation involves, and how each party to a collaboration - one whose first language is that of the source book, the other that of the new text - contributes to, and is affected as a writer by, the process. A remarkable achievement.
Davison’s compelling, impressively researched, and lucidly articulated book enables readers to appreciate both the significance of Woolf’s and Mansfield’s collaborative co-translations from the Russian and the poetics and politics of translation itself.