“Olga met Tsirkur in the toilette...”: Is it necessary to shock the reader with archaisms?

Abstract

The article’s title quotes a phrase from a letter from Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev to the Moscow postmaster general, Alexander Yakovlevich Bulgakov, dated February 9/21, 1838. The phrase refers to Bulgakov’s daughter, Olga Alexandrovna, who upon marriage became Princess Dolgorukova. Of course, anyone with some understanding of the history of Russian vocabulary should understand that in the 19th century, the word tualet ‘toilette’ had a different meaning than it did a century later, and that the ladies in question certainly did not meet in the ladies’ room. However, vstretit’sia v chem-libo ‘meet in something’ in the sense of “coinciding” (a clear syntactic Gallicism) is a rare construction and therefore can immediately shock the reader, causing confusion or a smile. Turgenev, however, clearly did not expect such a reaction. He simply wanted to tell his old friend that he had seen his daughter at a Parisian ball. It would seem that a translator of foreign works of the same period, interested in so-called temporal stylization and seeking to mark the distance between our time and the time of the work being translated, would do well to draw these most striking words and expressions from Russian texts. However, the purpose of this article, written from the perspective of a practical translator of French works of the first half of the 19th century, is to warn: this paint must be used with extreme caution. Not only will a stylistically neutral text appear overly aged, but in many cases the reader will simply not understand what’s being discussed, or what a woman’s organ, a merry revelry, or a subtle accent mean. However, there are cases where it’s necessary to go against reader habits, otherwise the translator will completely distort the picture of everyday life in a bygone era. Such is the case with the translation of the French word soulier. This article discusses ways to adequately translate it and demonstrates that it shouldn’t be confused with indoor slippers, which correspond to the French word pantoufles.