Open AccessDostoevsky in Slovakia: the novel “Crime and punishment” in Slovak translations
Author(s) -
Larisa А. Sugay,
Vladimír Biloveský
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
vestnik slavânskih kulʹtur
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2073-9567
DOI - 10.37816/2073-9567-2021-61-136-150
Subject(s) - slovak , vernacular , linguistics , philology , theme (computing) , literature , history , punishment (psychology) , ideology , point (geometry) , sociology , art , philosophy , psychology , politics , law , computer science , czech , political science , gender studies , social psychology , geometry , mathematics , feminism , operating system
The paper deals with the reception of F. M. Dostoevsky's legacy in Slovakia. The authors point out five paradoxes in the history of aesthetic existence of the works of Russian realist in Slovakia. They also identify literary, aesthetic and ideological reasons for the late arrival of the writer's works to the Slovak reader as well as the stages of difficult mastering of the classic's polyphonic novels. The theme Dostoevsky in Slovakia had attracted the attention of many researchers, but the problems of translating the writer's works into the Slovak language have not been analyzed yet. The paper focuses on four Slovak translations (Peter Tvrdý, 1932; Zora Jesenská, 1944, 1945; Zora Jesenská, 1957, 1965; Juraj Klaučo, 2006) of the novel Crime and Punishment. The authors specify the difficulties of an adequate transmission of the individual lexical units that are of the fundamental importance in the ideological and stylistic terms, e. g.: nouns and adjectives with diminutive suffixes, collision in the dialogues of characters of literary and vernacular word forms. The absence of equivalent forms in a lexical arsenal of receiving language leads to artistic losses. The socially and culturally marked differences in the speech of characters, representative for Dostoevsky's stylistics, are lost in translation. The translator of Dostoevsky's novels has to turn to serious philological research in order to convey nuances of the word used in the original.