Ilya Danishevsky's Mannelig in Chains Chosen for RusTrans Support
The cover of the Russian original, Маннелиг в цепях.
Ilya Danishevsky. Photo by Arkady Kazantsev, 2020.
Alex Karsavin and I are grateful to the ERC-funded RusTrans Publish project for awarding funding to our co-translation of Ilya Danishevsky’s Mannelig in Chains. Read about Ilya Danishevsky and Mannelig (and the 11 other translation projects!) here, and meet all the translators here.
The RusTrans initiative is unlike anything I’ve seen before in its in its focus on understanding the processes influencing the production and reception of Russian literature in cultural context. Drs. Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer describe it thus (full text here):
The RusTrans project explores how national politics interacts with processes of translation (such as selection of texts, the institutionalization of translation as a profession, critical reception, and audience reactions) in the context of the reception of Russian translation in (primarily) English-speaking countries, during a discrete time period. We do not neglect traditional questions of textual fidelity, such as the impact of domesticating or foreignizing strategies, but we prioritise our analysis of how translation has been utilized to connect governments with audiences. The idea that translation confers cultural capital and that it may be consciously utilized (however paradoxically) as a means of reinforcing or even re-inventing national culture is not new [...]. And yet, no single school or group of scholars has previously isolated the phenomenon of translation as a factor in the formation of national identity as a topic for analysis; nor has this factor been studied in the overseas reception of a single culture over an extended period of time. Our project will remedy this gap in translation scholarship.
Here are the four RusTRANS case studies, of which the RusTrans Publish project is #4:
1. How translated Russian literature informed the Irish nationalist movement and Irish-language prose realism (Pushkin in Grafton Street)
2. How translated Russian classics enhanced the UK public’s receptivity to non-canonical, heavily politicized Russian fictions (David Magarshack and Penguin Books)
3. How translators’ and editors’ selections signalled American patriotism within the USA’s Russian émigré communities in the mid-twentieth century (The Unmaking of Russians)
4. Ideological conflicts in contemporary literary translation from Russian in the UK (Publishing Translations from Russian Today).
Alex Karsavin and I are thrilled that Ilya Danishevsky’s novel Mannelig in Chains was chosen to play a part in this important initiative. Very much looking forward to reading the results of all four case studies!