Modernistyczna obsceniczność w przekładzie: ukraińskie i rosyjskie tłumaczenia Kochanka Lady Chatterley D.H. Lawrence’a u schyłku ZSRR

The paper focuses on Ukrainian and Russian translations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, published in 1989 and 1990. The framework for the analysis is provided by Loren Glass’s idea of a significant role of obscene vocabulary in the aesthetics of the twentieth-century Anglo-American literary modernism. The comparison of the two translations shows significant differences in the translators’ approaches to rendering Lawrence’s sexual-based language.

Obscenity Trials and American Literature

While obscenity is notoriously difficult to define and the test for determining obscenity has shifted over time, typically the term has referred to the crime of publishing prohibited, sexually explicit material. Obscenity has always been a criminal offense in the United States. Citing English common law, judges in the early republic and antebellum periods maintained that obscenity threatened to degrade the nation’s character. Nevertheless, obscenity law was not strongly or consistently enforced throughout the United States until the Comstock Act in 1873. Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, targeted Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass along with publications by advocates for feminism, free love, and birth control. American courts adopted the test put forth by Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn in Regina v. Hicklin (1868), which held that obscenity was defined by “the tendency . . . to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Obscenity became a battleground not only for debates about gender and sexual politics but also about the nature of the public sphere. During the 20th century, American literary presses and magazines became increasingly willing to challenge bans on sexually explicit speech, publishing controversial works including The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Ulysses by James Joyce. Modernist authors transgressed the legal bounds of propriety to explore the unconscious, fight for erotic pleasure free from heteronormative restraints, or claim aesthetic autonomy from moral and legal restrictions. United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” (1933) struck a blow against the Hicklin test. Affirming Judge John M. Woolsey’s not guilty verdict, Judge Augustus Hand proposed a new test for obscenity that anticipated many of the themes that would emerge when the Supreme Court took up this question with Roth v. United States (1957), which defined obscenity as “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient [i.e., sexual] interest.” The Court liberalized obscenity law even as it maintained restrictions on pornographic literature, setting off a wave of censorship cases including trials on Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. After Roth, lawyers defending borderline obscene publishers pushed for courts to hold that a work could not be obscene if it possessed any redeeming literary or social value. Free speech libertarians succeeded with Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966) and Redrup v. New York (1967). Although Miller v. California (1973) clawed back this ruling by stipulating that a work must possess “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” to be cleared of obscenity, in the 21st century obscenity convictions for publishing textual media have been limited to a handful of cases concerning pornographic depictions of child sexual abuse. Obscenity remains on the books but largely unenforced for literature.

Lady Chatterley, her Lover and their Room with a View: Modernist discourses on love and reality

The dawn of the 20th century in Britain witnessed changes in almost every aspect of women>s everyday lives. The emergence of the women's movement and a new generation of female professionals transformed the traditional patriarchal social structure. The present paper pursues two main goals. First, it shows how the novels Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Room with a View emerged from this social-historical moment in Britain. Since the novels depict the period before the Great War, they connect two periods in English history: Victorianism and Modernism, two different ways of living and two different approaches to moral principles. The protagonists of the novels, Connie, later lady Chatterley, and Lucy, personify the young and impressionable women of that era. Second, the focus is on the layers of interpretation/the codes of meaning that indicate the narrative interface: similarities in the novels' plots and their characters. They also reflect on the social divide that marked the period. The paper also shows that, according to the story, plot, and discourse of the novels, money and social status cannot substitute for the bindings of love.

Sculpture

A brief history of declining interest in sculpture helps this chapter to contextualise why Joseph Epstein, Eric Gill and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska believed the only way forward for this art lay in a return to the ancient skill of direct-carving. Discussion of these sculptors’ relationship to direct-carving is related to Lawrence’s parallel ambition to ‘break down the boundaries between verbal and visual expression’ as evidenced by The Rainbow. Reviewing the sculptural efforts of Lawrence’s close friend, Mark Gertler, suggests how they impacted on Women in Love, through Lawrence’s depiction of the sculptor Loerke and the expression of ideas associated with Futurism, Deutscher Werkbund and Vorticism. This leads to the suggestion that the Vorticist sculptor, Gaudier, may have had more effect on Women in Love than has hitherto been recognised. The chapter concludes with evidence of Lawrence’s influence, primarily through Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.

Popular Culture

Lawrence wanted his writing to be widely read, but he also wanted it to be an antidote to the problems he thought were exacerbated by popular culture. This chapter examines cinema in The Lost Girl (1920) and music in St. Mawr (1925), where Lawrence's ideas about the harmful effects of popular culture share much with T. W. Adorno’s arguments about how repetitive popular cultural forms constrain critical thinking and the desire for social change. Pornography and Obscenity (1929) contains Lawrence's most direct attack on popular culture, which he claims transmits repressive ideas about sex to the public and limits people’s capacities for independent thought. In the aftermath of the censorship of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929), Pornography and Obscenity asks its readers to engage in dialectical thinking: could things that are sanctioned and approved - like popular culture - in fact be harmful?