Abstract

THE TRANSLATIONS INTO RUSSIAN OF THE "DIVINE COMEDY" AS PART OF “WORLD LITERATURE”. Translations are essential to the concept of “world literature” (Venuti 2013: 193), which, in turn, «is not an infinite ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading» (Damrosch 2003: 5). Dante’s "Divine Comedy" is considered a canonical text par excellence and it has been translated into many languages of the world. A recent project by J. Blakesley of the University of Leeds (2017, 2022) on a concrete statistical basis has reduced the “canonicity” of this work, which has not yet been translated into seventy-five per cent of the most widely spoken languages in the world. In the second and third parts we review the various translations, partial or complete, of the "Divine Comedy" in Russia from the eighteenth century to the present. Two main types of approach emerge. The first is foreignizing and favours the source text and its lexical and stylistic characteristics in order to renew and enrich the Russian literary and cultural heritage. The second is a domesticating approach that aims to enhance the aesthetic effect of the text by euphony, elegance of style, and simplicity of concepts. There are also mixed solutions, such as that of the now canonical translation by Michail Lozinsky completed in the mid-forties. On the one hand it has a foreignizing approach thanks to a careful use of archaic expressions and Slavonisms and the rigid cage of the verse and strophic form, while on the other it fully fits into the Russian poetic tradition thanks to its flowing, euphonic and elegant style and the constant “attenuation” of the conceptual and linguistic asperities of the original text. After a long period in which Lozinsky’s canonical translation remained undisputed, towards the end of the twentieth century two new complete translations of the "Divine Comedy" into Russian were published. Aleksandr Iliushin’s translation (1995) adopts the syllabic meter instead of the traditional iambic pentameter. The translation by Vladimir Marantsman (1999), in controversy with Lozinsky aims at the «greatest possible precision», valuing the linguistic variety of the original, but avoiding the use of archaisms and offering contemporary readers a text they are invited to explore freely. Finally, already in the twenty-first century, Ol’ga Sedakova translated two cantos of Purgatorio and one of Paradiso, renouncing a metric version in order to give «an interlinear translation as faithful as possible» of the theological contents of the poem, often ignored or trivialized in previous translations. It is evident at this point that against the background of the discussion about “world literature” there also arises the problem of the re-translation of Dante’s text, or of the revision of its pre-existing canon or canons in Russian culture.