Exciting news from the exciting RusTrans project. As its website explains, “’The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA’ (RusTrans for short) is a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 802437), and located at the University of Exeter. The project is led by Dr Muireann Maguire (Principal Investigator) and Dr Cathy McAteer (Post-doctoral Fellow).
What is the dark side of translation? Most of us think of translation as a universal good. Translation is valued, taught, and often funded as a deterrent to monolingual nationalism and cultural parochialism. Yet the praxis of translation – the actual processes of selecting and translating literary texts, and of publishing and publicizing translations – is highly politicized, often subverted by ideological prejudice or state interference. Translators necessarily have a personal agenda, as do editors, publishers, and other agents. Every translation is an act of cultural appropriation, reinventing the thoughts of one language in the words of another.
[…] RusTrans investigates how individuals, and governments, exploit this ‘dark side’ of translation to reap cultural capital by translating lesser-known literature into global languages (and the reverse).
[…] The project’s main aim is to research why translators, publishers, and funding bodies support the translation of certain texts, and not others.”
Ealier this year, RusTrans held a competition for funding English translations of contemporary literary fiction written in Russian and have just announced the twelve winning projects by fourteen translators (two are co-translations). The conditions for these awards, which will fund excerpts of larger works, are rather unique. RusTrans is asking the translators to keep them posted over the next two years about the process to secure publication for the works in their entirety: as they explain, “we plan to follow selected translators through the process of pitching and/or submitting a new translation to publishers in real time” to gain a fuller understanding of the “dark side” of translation, driven by politics, economics, and personal biases.
One of RusTrans’ stated criteria for picking the projects was diversity, and the final list has a number of women writers, a queer writer, writers from non-Russian parts of the former Soviet Union, as well as those who now live outside of the post-Soviet space. Punctured Lines joins RusTrans in congratulating the winners below (as listed on the RusTrans website) and looks forward to following this fantastic endeavor:
- William Barclay, with Bulat Khanov’s novel about an angry academic, Gnev.
- Michele Berdy, with various stories and a novella by Tasha Karlyuka.
- Huw Davies, with Dmitry Bykov’s historical novel June.
- Shelley Fairweather-Vega, with short fiction “Aslan’s Bride” by Nadezhda Chernova and “Black Snow of December” by Asel Omar.
- Annie Fisher and Alex Karsavin, co-translating Ilya Danishevsky’s queer modernist experimental novel Mannelig in Chains.
- Polly Gannon, with Sana Valiulina’s Soviet-Estonian historical novel, I’m Not Afraid of Bluebeard.
- Lisa Hayden, with Alexei Salnikov’s debut novel The Department.
- Alex Shvartsman, with K.A. Teryna’s science fiction novella The Factory.
- Isaac Sligh and Viktoria Malik, co-translating Viktor Pelevin’s novel iPhuck 10.
- Sian Valvis, with Narine Abgaryan’s semi-autobiographical novel of an Armenian childhood, Manunia.
- Sarah Vitali, with Figgle-Miggle (Ekaterina Chebotaryova)’s novel You Love These Films So Much.
- Lucy Webster, with Andrei Astvatsaturov’s satirical novel on Russian academia, People in Nude.
Punctured Lines 
See, this is really interesting! As an avid reader of translations from the Russian (and other languages!) I’m very aware I’m getting a partial picture of the literature because what I read is dependant on what others decide is commercial/interesting/worth translating etc. I hear about books e.g.on Lisa’s blog and I can’t read them because they aren’t translated and probably won’t be. I’ll follow this with interest!
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Olga and I were just talking about, in connection with this, how much of translation is motivated by “extra” literary/artistic considerations. Maddening to think how much of a partial picture we’re getting of literatures where we can’t read it in the original (and let’s face it – for most of us, that would be most literatures!).
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