Soviet ideological and puritanical censorship of Ukrainian literary translations
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Date
2024
Authors
Rudnytska, Nataliia
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Abstract
The article explores censorship of literary translations in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialistic Republic, delineating political and ideological modes and demonstrating the ideological underpinning of the puritanical mode. It describes the censorial system in the Ukrainian SSR as determined by the general goal of Soviet censorship and the local context. It then examines the censorship practices on the textual level in Ukrainian translations of novels by British and North American authors and highlights the variability of translations of the Soviet period. The aim of this article is to dwell on the category of ideological censorship in the Soviet context, to demonstrate the censorial tactics employed by this kind of censorship in Ukrainian translations, and to highlight the differences between the Ukrainian and Russian translations of the Soviet period. Censorship had a multifaceted impact on translated literature in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Baer 2022; Blium 2008; Rudnytska 2022; Sherry 2015; Witt 2011). Although in different "Soviet republics" it had the identical goal, its tasks also depended on local contexts, as it was in the Baltic States (Maskaliūnienė and Juršėnaitė 2023; Monticelli and Lange 2014) and Ukraine (Strilkha 2006; Kalnychenko and Kolomiyets 2022). However, the system of ideological censorship of literary translations in the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) has not been sufficiently studied. Besides, "the terminological confusion associated with "ideology" could not but influence the examining of the expression of ideology in translation (Faucett and Munday 2009, 137), and there is still a certain ambiguity associated with the ideological vs. political factors in the research of censorship of literary translations of the Soviet period. The case studies below, based on Ukrainian and Russian translations of novels by the British and North American authors John Galsworthy, Jack London, J. D. Salinger, Theodor Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway which were available in the UkSSR, will focus on censorship practices on the textual level, including the use of ideologemes and the excision, substitution, or addition of fragments of text.
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Keywords
literary translations, Ukrainian Soviet Socialistic Republic, censorship practices, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ideology, article
Citation
Rudnytska N. Soviet ideological and puritanical censorship of Ukrainian literary translations / Nataliia Rudnytska // World Literature Studies. - 2024. - Vol. 16, Issue 3. - P. 15-26. - https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2024.16.3.2