The Visibility of the Translator

This essay is auto-ethnographic. It is based on the author’s personal memories of working in Moscow during the 1980s and early 1990s at the Progress and Raduga publishing houses’ Telugu division. The article aims to address the issue of a translator’s visibility, a discussion initiated by Lawrence Venuti in The Translator’s Invisibility (1995), which heralded a new era in Translation Studies by emphasizing the importance of translators in literary creation. This essay examines translation as a collaborative activity in the context of Russian-Indian relations, where a sense of team spirit and cultural enthusiasm prevailed over state censorship and ideology. It also states that the impact of translation work, commissioned by Progress and Raduga, on Telugu readers is difficult to overestimate. Today, when there is no longer any state-sponsored book production programme between post-Soviet Russia and India, contemporary Indian readers retain great interest in books from the former USSR.