L.-F. Celine's Voyage au Bout de la Nuit in Russian translations

Louis-Ferdinand Celine is one of the central figures in the literature and culture of the 20th century. Being a participant of the First World War and disabled by it in the novel Journey to the End of the Night he was a deeper, fuller and sharper describer of the consequences of the historical disaster than any other representative of the lost generation. In his further works he continued to write about the new information on the essence of the world that becomes world-in-itself, deprived of God, incomprehensible and alien to the logic of the person. Celine expressed absolute rejection of reality with its conventional lie penetrating human existence at all levels. Until mid-1990s he Russian-speaking reader knew Celine as the author of one work -Journey to the End of the Night translated by Elza Triolet. After her "plastic surgery" of the novel it is hard to recognize the two pieces as the original and the translation. Triolet's translation carried out its cultural function compensating for the artistic faults. For the centenary of the writer, in 1994, Elza Triolet's version was republished, but in the new social and cultural context it rather looked like a bibliographic curiosity. Yu.B. Korneyev's translation became popular. It was republished repeatedly, including Celine's Collection of Works. Another translation (by Aleksandra Yunko and Yury Gladilin) appeared the following year and in the conditions of the Post-Soviet reality sounded foreign, thus initially losing the competition. Quite recently in Kharkov a new translation was published, by N.V. Lutsyuk, but Korneyev's translation is still the most popular one. Elza Triolet obviously tried to produce the effect of live speech by simplifying the text, which inevitably resulted in the loss of meanings. Yu. Korneyev, according to the aesthetic extremism of the era of Perestroika, chose a different way to achieve a different goal, trying first to reproduce the intensity of the shock that Celine's innovations once caused. The translation popular among the publishers and representing Celine's novel for the Russian reader in fact is not equivalent or adequate to the original, in many respects it distorts the author's message. Yu. Korneyev's translation shows the hasty sensational nature characteristic for Perestroika culture, which makes the work a peculiar monument of the era and shows the need in a new, more adequate version of one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. The shortcomings of this translation make us emphasize the importance for translators of using literature researches.

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