Copyright

Zaya Vandan

Published On

2024-04-03

Page Range

pp. 485–498

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

Cultural Dialogue between Russia and Mongolia

Gombosuren Tserenpil and the Poetics of Translating Dostoevsky’s Novel

Chapter of: Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context(pp. 485–498)
This essay combines a historical overview with lexical analysis of the cultural dialogue between Russia and Mongolia, presenting a brief summary of Mongolian translation studies. My focus is the widely honoured Mongolian diplomat and politician, Tserenpil Gombosuren (1943- ), who made significant contributions to the field of literary translation. His translation activity offers insights into the development of literary and cultural relations between the two countries, including important phases of Mongolia’s reception of Russian and Soviet literature as well as cultural aspects and practices of literary translation in Mongolia. The stages of Dostoevsky’s reception in this country, previously unresearched, are presented here for the first time). I show the idiosyncrasies of Mongolian literary language through a comparative analysis of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot and Gombosuren’s 2014 translation. I treat linguistic and translational processes as based on social and cultural relations, drawing on the work of translation theorists (Venuti, Nida, and others) to define the specifics of Gombosuren’s translation strategies. Gombosuren transferred Dostoevsky’s world to a completely different linguistic and cultural system; as my study will show, these novels now play a significant role in the enrichment of Mongolian language and culture.

Contributors

Zaya Vandan

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1698-9349

Zaya Vandan was awarded her PhD in Literature (2016) from Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary). Her main research area is nineteenth-century Russian literature, focusing on the poetics and reception of Dostoevsky’s works in Hungary and Mongolia. She specialises in the theory and practice of cultural translation within Translation Studies.

Muireann Maguire

(translator)
Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at University of Exeter
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7615-6720

Muireann Maguire is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include nineteenth-century Russian literature, the translation and reception of Russian literature in Western Europe, and the representation of maternal subjectivity in fiction. Besides a newly minted passion for collecting vintage paperbacks, she is starting a new project about William Golding’s reception of Tolstoy. She is currently completing a monograph about the history of literary translation from Russian in the US, provisionally titled The Spectre of Nicholas Wreden: Translating Russian Literature in Twentieth-Century America, 1886-1986 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).