none 10.1075/btl.89.14bae John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 67858145 1419278 1419183 202507021821000023 10.1075 2025-07-02T16:20:18Z 2014-03-23T22:31:04Z 3 0929-7316 10.1075/btl https://benjamins.com/ catalog/btl Brian James Baer Kent State University https://ror.org/049pfb863 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5238-0258 Literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia This volume presents Eastern Europe and Russia as a distinctive translation zone, despite significant internal differences in language, religion and history. The persistence of large multilingual empires, which produced bilingual and even polyglot readers, the shared experience of “belated modernity” and the longstanding practice of repressive censorship produced an incredibly vibrant, profoundly politicized, and highly visible culture of translation throughout the region as a whole. The individual contributors to this volume examine diverse manifestations of this shared translation culture from the Romantic Age to the present day, revealing literary translation to be at times an embarrassing reminder of the region’s cultural marginalization and reliance on the West and at other times a mode of resistance and a metaphor for cultural supercession. This volume demonstrates the relevance of this region to the current scholarship on alternative translation traditions and exposes some of the Western assumptions that have left the region underrepresented in the field of Translation Studies. 89 4 13 2011 4 7 2011 9789027224378 9789027287335 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/btl.89 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027287335 https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027287335.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/btl.89/html Brian James Baer Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA https://ror.org/049pfb863 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5238-0258 Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov in 1950s America This chapter explores the relationship between politics and translation theory in the evolution of the theoretical positions of two of the most influential “agents of translation” in the postwar years, Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Nabokov. Within the rarefied atmosphere of Cold War America, the author traces the polarization of the translation positions of these men, exiles from Soviet Russia, who both engaged in literary translation and contemplated translation as a phenomenon. This polarization played itself out in the context of a proposed joint translation project of the Russia Medieval epic Slovo o polku Igoreve [The Lay of Igor’s Campaign], the authenticity of which was something of a cause célèbre in émigré circles of the time. The relationship between these two enormously talented individuals raises important questions regarding translation and politics, translation and exile, the agency of the translator, the connection of theory to history, and the very identity of the literary text, which are still relevant today. 4 13 2011 4 7 2011 171 186 10.1075/btl.89.14bae https://benjamins.com/catalog/btl.89.14bae https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/btl.89.14bae/html