Translation Practices of Ivan Bunin (the Short Story “The Magi”)
Bogdanova Olga Vladimirovna, Liu Minjie
A. I. Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University
Far Eastern Federal University
Submitted: 06.02.2023
Abstract. The paper is devoted to the analysis of Ivan Bunin’s translated short story “The Magi” (1931), which was included in the cycle “Provençal Tales Retold”. The research aims to comprehend the role of Russian folklore in the formation of the poetic world of the Bunin text created as a translation (more precisely, a “retelling”) of a novella by the French writer Frederic Mistral (1830-1914), Nobel laureate (1904). The authors of the paper identify the main motives that prompted Bunin to turn to foreign folklore, to the regional epic of Provence, determine the hidden intentions that influenced the writer when creating the translated text. In particular, the authors pay attention to the tendency of “straightening” the plot outline of F. Mistral’s memoirs, state that I. Bunin gave the translated text poetic imagery through motifs and speech-stylistic formulas of Russian folklore. The study is novel in that it is the first to analyse the short story “The Magi”, which has not previously attracted critics’ attention, and to interpret the strategies of Bunin’s “translation” activities. As a result, it has been proved that the motive for Bunin’s turn to the folklore of southern France, which was foreign to him, was not the semantic layer of F. Mistral’s folk records and memoirs, but the nostalgic feelings that the folklore of Provence awakened in the prose writer’s soul, which conjured up the memories of the Christmas festivities of the abandoned Russia. It has been shown that Bunin’s knowledge of the basics and principles of Russian folklore helped the writer, on the one hand, to preserve the identity of Mistral’s memoirs, on the other hand, to bring additional nostalgic intentions mediated by the techniques and principles of Russian folklore into the “foreign” translated text.
Key words and phrases: И. Бунин, рассказ «Волхвы», цикл «Провансальские пересказы», система героев, композиция, фольклор, I. Bunin, short story “The Magi”, cycle “Provençal Tales Retold”, character system, composition, folklore
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