change within literary systems, Tynyanov recognizes that a new “constitutive principle”
may start from a series of chance occurrences or encounters, but in order to become
substantial the principle may need the transfer of models and materials from beyond
itself (1924: 19-20). That observation was not actually accompanied by any
consideration of the role of translations, although elsewhere Tynyanov did write a
critical account of Tyutchev’s renditions of Heine (study dated 1921, included in
Arxaisty i novatory
in 1929 and in the French translation
Formalisme et histoire
littéraire
of 1991 but not in the partial German translation of 1967). A framework for
the study of literary translation was certainly there, but the study itself would seem not
to have been part of the main agenda of Russian Formalism. Any potential insights
about translation would remain without immediate impact within Russian theory,
although some students of Tynjanov’s, like
Andrei Fedorov
, became major theorists of
translation in the Soviet era, and Jakobson would go on to write several seminal papers
on translation, as we have noted in previous chapters.
The legacy of the Formalist moment would have been passed on, in various
forms, to the sociolinguist Valentin Vološinov, perhaps in part to the cultural theorist
Mikhail
Bahktin, and more obviously to the semioticians Yuri Lotman and Boris
Uspenski, whose names might be more familiar. None of those cultural theorists,
however, produced systematic theoretical work on translation; nor did the later
Formalists themselves. When Andrei Fedorov wrote his ground-breaking “Introduction
to the Theory of Translation” in 1953, he had studied at the State Institute for the
History of the Arts, where the Formalists had created a program (our thanks to Itamar
Even-Zohar for this information), so something of the basic approach certainly lived on.
The traces of that legacy might be divined from Fedorov’s highly systematic approach
to basic principles (after paying due homage to Marx and Lenin) and his detailed
investigation of the way different genres and stylistic features should be translated. The
same can be said of
Efim Etkind
, whose work on Russian poet-translators (1973) drew
attention to the role of translation in the development of cultures.
From Fedorov and others we do reach a certain Russian school of translation
theory, which includes important work by
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