“Soviet Pushkin” in Latin America: How to Translate the Myth? Dovlatov’s “Pushkin Hills” in Brazil and Argentina

The article aims to analyze the translations of Sergei Dovlatov’s novella “Pushkin Hills” into Spanish (Argentine national version) and Portuguese (Brazilian national version). In both countries, the translations were published in 2016; these were the first publications of Dovlatov’s works in a separate book in Latin America. Based on the comparative text analysis within the communicativefunctional approach framework, the strategies of translating the novella as a “text of culture” according to the concept of Yury Lotman are investigated, taking into account its inherent intertextuality and allusions to the figure of the poet Alexandre Pushkin and the Soviet Pushkin myth. According to the myth, which had developed by the 1970s, Pushkin appears in the mass consciousness as an ideal man with an impeccable biography, whose facial features and program works are well known to any Soviet schoolchild. In Dovlatov’s work, the Pushkin Museum-Reserve appears as a kind of the “Soviet Pushkin” pantheon, which has little to do with the real poet, and where staff and tourists bow before Pushkin with an almost religious fervor. The main instrument of the Soviet myth’s deconstruction is the author’s irony, which appeals to implicit knowledge, absent in the bearer of another culture. Such semantic load makes the translator’s task much more difficult.

Due to the peculiarities of the comic effects associated with Pushkin’s myth, as well as the focus of the author’s irony on the recipient of the translation, the popular strategy of domestication, i.e. adapting humor to the culture of translation, turns out to be inapplicable. As demonstrated by the analysis, despite the ignorance of the original text’s culture realities by native speakers of different cultures, the translators managed to largely convey the linguistic and cultural uniqueness of the novella thanks to the preface, introducing the reader to Pushkin’s myth, and comments.

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