Strategies for translation of Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky into German (by example of translations by E.K. Rahsin and S. Geier)

In the light of the overall current strategies and directions of translation (orientation on the language, text and culture of the original, or on the language and cultural context of the target language), the author of the article provides a comparative analysis of the translations of F.M. Dostoevsky's novel Demons (chapter "At Tikhon") into German, made by E.K. Rahsin and S. Geier. They are a part of the history of German-language translations of Dostoevsky's novels and are sampled for analysis as playing a significant role in the German reception of Demons in the 20th century. The translation by Rahsin was a result of teamwork. The issues of translation of the novel were discussed in the salon of Merezhkovsky. According to Rahsin, a good translator of Dostoevsky should be: 1) a chemist who finds the right words, 2) an engineer who reconstructs the sentences, 3) an artist who creates the arrangement of the "action", pays attention to the shade of sound, rhythm, etc., and 4) a critic, an expert in the German language able to judge whether and which bold solutions / innovations are appropriate or not. S. Geier's approach to the artistic text and its translation was defined by the sound, so she sought to give the German translation the sound and syntax of the Russian original. The translations in the paper are compared on the lexical, syntactic and stylistic levels. It is stated that Rahsin and Geier try to find German equivalents of the original words and expressions in different ways. Rahsin gives explanations in the text of the novel, and Geier, trying not to disturb the sound of the original, often gives a fairly extensive explanation in the notes. Unlike Geier, Rahsin often orders words by the rules of the neutral norm of the German language, thus depriving them of stylistic coloring, expressiveness, smoothing its characteristic roughness. It is concluded that Geier successfully managed to bring the German translation to the original text. She did not seek to correct Dostoevsky's text or make it easier to read for the German public (which, the author believes, was the purpose of the translation by Rahsin), but gave it a rough feeling of the fresh and polyphonic sound of the Russian original.

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