“RUSSIAN MAIDEN”: PLOT TRANSFORMATION IN TRANSLATION

Abstract. The book by a Swiss historian Paul Henri Mallet “An Introduction to the History of Denmark” (“Histoire du Danemarch”) made a considerable impact on Russian literature.
The Russians were mostly attracted by the plot about the love of King Harald Hadrad for Elizabeth, the daughter of Yaroslav the Wise.

In total, there were nine translations of this text into Russian, including the translations by N.A.Lvov (1793), I.F.Bogdanovich (1810), N.M. Karamzin (1818) and A.K. Tolstoy (1869). The most famous of these translations was the text of Konstantin Dmitrievich Batyushkov.

However, this plot not only became the reason to produce quite free variants of translation – translations revealing the spirit of romanticism, but also served as the basis for one of the secondary plots, namely, the plot of “Ruslan and Lyudmila” by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.

Undoubtedly, the reasons for such attention to this text of romantic poets and their translation strategies deserve a separate and comprehensive consideration – what have become the object of the research in the article.

First of all, the choice of texts for translation took place in conditions of the influence on Russian literature of such trends as pre- romanticism and romanticism. The Russian ossianism was part of this process. As a result, it was the translation of Konstantin Batyushkov that began to be perceived as an exemplary romantic elegy and gave rise to several imitative texts.

In addition, the process of such a reception fits into the context of the literary struggle that unfolded at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. As is often the case, this confrontation was built on the idea of appropriation. And the text that Mallet placed in his historical work becomes the object of this appropriation. Each side seeks to correlate this text with its own literary strategies.

At the same time, this process is carried out under conditions of incomplete information about the very era of the creation of the text. The knowledge of the European Middle Ages was extremely conditional. The knowledge of the Russian Middle Ages was virtually absent. In this case, the translator had to rely not so much on the context as to imagine it. The very direction of the translator’s thought provides us with excellent material for analyzing the notions of the historical process that existed in Russian society.

Keywords: translation, poetry, comparative literature