Translating Multicultural Texts: Challenges and Solutions

Translating literary texts involves decoding not only the language but also the cultural elements integrated into the text. The situation becomes even more challenging if the translated text is multicultural. The original text may be full of references, allusions and subtexts that can present certain difficulties even for native speakers. The translator faces the double challenge: not only to convey the plot, which is the least difficult part but make the reader feel the subtleties and nuances of the cultures presented in the text. Cultures are not necessarily associated with different ethnic and religious identities. They may also refer to cultures of certain periods in history, cultures of age groups, cultures of local communities. Oversimplifications made by the translator rob the reader of the pleasure of reading and may create a distorted image of the writer and the text. We aim to analyse typical translation errors made by translators of contemporary Russian fiction into English. The analysis is based on Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell from the Sky and Dmitry Novikov’s A Flame Out in the Sea, both originally written in Russian and characterised by a high degree of multiculturalism. We also suggest practical ways to overcome the difficulties arising in the process of translating multicultural texts.

Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction

Combining ideas from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this essay proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging field of post-Soviet memory studies. Sociological polls demonstrate that approximately one-fourth of Russians remember that their relatives were victims of terror, yet the existing monuments, museums, and rituals are inadequate to commemorate these losses. In this economy of memory, ghosts and monsters become a prominent subject of post-Soviet culture. The incomplete work of mourning turns the unburied dead into the undead. Analyzing Russian novels and films of the last decade, Alexander Etkind emphasizes the radical distortions of history, semihuman creatures, fantastic cults, manipulations of the body, and circular time that occur in these fictional works. To account for these phenomena, Etkind coins the concept “magical historicism” and discusses its relation to the magical realism of postcolonial literatures. The memorial culture of magical historicism is not so much postmodern as it is, precisely, post-Soviet.