Eternal problems and challenges of translating Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Eternal Husband”

Abstract

This article seeks to show the problems arising from doing a stylistic analysis of Dostoevsky’s novella “The Eternal Husband” (1870). Discussing adequate translation of the story has not yet become a subject of research in Russia or abroad. The research material is representative text fragments and their translations into English done by Constance Garnett (1917), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1997), and Hugh Аplin (2007). Studying the qualitative characteristics of the four existing translations of The Eternal Husband made it impossible to take into account the very first translation made by the British writer, historian and poet Frederick Whishaw (1888) because of the liberties taken toward the author’s content. One conclusion is that the entire professionalism of eminent translators may be insufficient to convey the numerous features of the 19th century’s Russian colloquial speech, on the one hand, and Dostoevsky’s idiostylistic features, on the other. The translations of phraseological units, double negatives with inversion, spelling nuances of the characters’ speech show that the author’s intentional content remains unattainable for the native English speaker. Conscious or unconscious changes to the original language invariably leads to a narrowed polyphonism of Dostoevsky’s work, reduces the interpretive potential of the characters’ speech and, as a result, distorts the multidimensional perception of the protagonists. This study marks the bicentenary of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s birth and aims to spark interest in translating the 19th century’s fiction whose popularity remains undeniable in the 21st century.

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