Two Russian Decamerons

Abstract

The article juxtaposes two translations of Boccaccio's The Decameron — the one by Alexander N. Veselovsky (1891–1892) and the other by Nikolai M. Liubimov (1970). What is unique and noteworthy here is that, over time, the more recent translation neither displaced the older nor lost ground to it; both versions found their proper niches in today's book publishing market and hence, as one might infer, are intended for different categories of reader. Veselovsky, in his translation, keeps to the principle of formal fidelity to the original (‘literalism'): this reveals itself both on the level of certain intra-phraseological units (‘word-for-word' translation) and in preservation of the original syntactic order of the source text. Incidentally, Veselovsky did not attempt to artificially anachronize the language. Liubimov, on the other hand, follows, in the main, the principles of the Soviet school of ‘creative' translation. The language of Liubimov's Decameron is the standard literary tongue of the 19th–20th centuries, which is moderately encrusted with Slavisms; it exhibits no modernizations, nor any particular verbal ingenuities that characterize, for instance, his translation of Rabelais. Unlike Veselovsky, Liubimov did not attempt to create a specific diction for his Decameron. Both translators refrain from re-creating the vast rhetorical array of Boccaccio. Veselovsky, at times, tugs at the language (though not outright violently); thanks to that technique of ‘ostranenie' (defamiliarization), these linguistic displacements, this diction which has no direct analogs in the Russian tradition, he fills the void created by the lack of any counterparts of Decameron in the Russian literary tradition. Yet his action is far from complete; by and large, it is possible to argue that Veselovsky's translation principally differs from Liubimov's in that rather than bringing the source text to the target audience, it brings the audience to the source text.