Translation tradition

Lecture 3_4. Translation from Kievan Rus

PLAN

1. Translation Tradition. Translation in Kievan Rus (10^th - 13^th century)

2. Translation in the sixteenth centuries

3. Translation in the seventeenth centuries

4. Translation in the eighteenth century

5. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

6. The Soviet period

7. Translation in the post-Soviet period (the 1990s)

Translation tradition

Ukraine/Russia is part of the East Slavonic family of languages. The history of modern Ukraine dates back to the ninth century AD, when a number of East Slavonic tribes united to form a new state known as Kievan Rus, after the name of its capital. Later the country's political centre moved to Moscow, which became the capital of a united Russia under Ivan the Great in the fifteenth century. Contact with Western Europe was initiated in the seventeenth century by Peter the Great, who established the educational system and built a new capital, St Petersburg (later to become known as Leningrad). Political unrest under the tsars culminated in a period of civil war (1918-1922), after which the Communists established control of the country. The end of World War Two saw the rise of the Soviet Union as one of the two major world powers. The mid-1980s saw the beginning of a period of social and political reform, known in the West as perestroika, and the progressive disengagement of Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) from Eastern Europe. The recorded history of translation in Ukraine is as long and rich in events. The following is a brief overview of he main trends evident during different historical periods.

Translation in Kievan Rus (10^th - 13^th century)

Writing, literature and translations were introduced in Kievan Rus in a relatively mature form. In the year 864, a Greek priest named CYRIL and his brother METHODIUS were sent by the Byzantine emperor to do missionary work among the Slavonic peoples. They began with the creation of a new alphabet (now known as Cyrillic) which they used to translate a number of religious texts from Greek into Old Church Slavonic. Among their first translations were the New Testament, the Psalter and the Prayer Book. After Rus embraced Christianity in 988, numerous translations were made to give the converts access to the philosophical and ethical doctrines of the new religion and to the church's rituals and customs. These included a variety of genres, such as Lives of Saints, Homilies, Chronicles and the like. Apocrypha also enjoyed great popularity with their stories of miracles, fantasies and exoticism, sometimes bordering on what was later called fiction. Most of these translations were made in Bulgaria but were used in Rus. The translators of religious books usually opted for word-for-word rendering of the source text.

A number of translations which were not exclusively religious and relatively less literal were also made in Rus at thetime. Among them were such books as the Zhitie Andreya Yurodivogo (The Life of Andrei, the Man of God), Pchela (The Bee), Kosmografiya (Cosmography), and Fiziolog (The Physiologist), to mention just a few. One considerable achievement was the translation of Joseph Flavius' The Judaic War, in which the translator successfully avoided many pitfalls of literalness.

In this early period the translator's name was not mentioned as a rule, and it was often impossible to say whether a translation was made within the country or beyond its borders.

During the tragic years of the Mongol invasion (1228-1480) translations continued to play a major role in taping the cultural character of the country. More parts of the Bible were translated and some of the previous translations were revised or replaced with new ones. Alongside religious translations, translated versions of non-religious material gradually began to appear, including Istoriya Indiyskogo Korolevstva (A Tale of the Idian Kingdom) and Troyanskaya Voina (The Trojan War). Most translations were made from Greek, some from Latin and Old Hebrew.

This period also witnessed the gradual formation of the Russian language as a result of mutual influence between Old Church Slavonic and the people's vernacular. However, religious texts continued to be translated into Old Church Slavonic, which nobody spoke outside church services. At the same time, contact with other countries required the translation of political and business documentation, and here the new Russian language began to gain ground. Apart from translations, original texts during this period were themselves also written in a mixture of Slavonic and Russian.

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