Russia Englished: Theorizing translation in the 20th century

This dissertation explores the development of translation as a literary practice and an interdisciplinary metaphor through the 20th century, with an emphasis on the translation into English of the Russian literary canon. Its central concerns are with the changing concepts of "information" as the object of translational acts and with the ways that translation has been understood at certain historical moments in relation to analogous activities of textual production and revision, including ethnology, textual editing, and the writing of literary theory.;The first chapter examines the desire for literary translation to convey anthropological knowledge in the modernist hope that reading Dostoevsky in English would grant some form of access to the Russian "soul" (understood as an essentialist national character). While Conrad's Under Western Eyes demonstrates an impressionist anxiety that the non-rational Russian soul must be mediated and interpreted rather than simply translated if it is to become legible to a Western audience, Constance Garnett's version of Dostoevsky's The Possessed suggests that this standardization and clarification also creates barriers to transcultural revelation.;The second chapter uses the concept of "information" in post-WWII information theory to read Nabokov's literal translation of Eugene Onegin, arguing that Nabokov's work is designed to enable the reader to mechanistically re-created Pushkin's original. This same structure of reading is traced through Pale Fire, where the idea of information transmission connects textual editing, translation, and the literal and metaphoric deaths of the author.;The final chapter traces the connections between translation and narratology in the Englishing of the Russian Formalists' distinction between fabula and syuzhet, using the history of these terms' transmission to critique the practices of calquing, nontranslation, and "abusive fidelity" that have dominated the translation of theoretical texts since the 1980's, and suggesting in their place a model that understands translation primarily through reception, retranslation, and adaptation.