Russian translations of the matter-of-fact-romance It Is Never Too Late to Mend by Ch. Reade: on literary translation multiplicity

The present research focuses on the Russian translation reception of Charles Reade's literary activity in the mid-to-late 19th century and a popular Victorian literary genre of the matter-of-fact-romance in particular because Reade made a great contribution to the appearance of the genre under study being its founder. Two Russian translations of Reade's romance It Is Never Too Late to Mend, which laid the foundation for the given genre model, are considered in the paper in regards to literary translation multiplicity. One of the translation versions called Luchshe pozdno, chem nikogda: roman v dvukh chastyakh [Better Late than Never: a Romance in 2 Parts] was published in the literary magazine Biblioteka dlya chteniya [Library for reading] in 1957. The second translation Nikogda nepozdno isparvit'sya: obyknovennaya istoriya [It's Never Late to Mend: a Common Story] came out in the magazine Sobranie inostrannyh romanov, povestey i rasskazov v perevodah na russkij yazyk [Collection of Foreign Novels, Narratives and Stories Translated into Russian] in 1957 as well. The given fact highlights the significance of Reade's romance for the Russian literature, particularly for establishing its novelistic genre. Moreover, a pressing literary problem of translation multiplicity can be set up since it still remains one of the most under-investigated issues in the theory of literary translation. A comparison study of both translations and the original revealed that the translation reception of the romance It Is Never Too Late to Mend was mainly determined by the context of popular literature. Readers of the first above mentioned version primarily focused on the peculiarities that associated the original with sensational fiction as well as with traditions of educational ideology and romantic aesthetics. Many chapters of the first translation, especially related to the description of the characters' life in jail, represent a summary translation resulting in a considerable semantic compression of the original. In contrast with the first translation version, the reception of the second one was based on a detailed interpretation of the events happening in the narrative and the characters' relationships. Almost all the chapters of the second version present a detailed "word for word" translation and show current social problems that are a keynote of the whole romance according to Ch. Reade. Consequently, both Russian translations of the romance under study can be considered as narrative synonyms emphasizing translational benefits and drawbacks contrasted with each other. Therefore, their synchronicity testifies not only and not so much to meaningfulness of the original but to the level of translation culture achieved in Russia by the mid-to-late 19th century as well as to the diversity of deep processes related to the establishment of the Russian classic romance adopting the traditions of foreign literature, particularly the Victorian matter-of-fact-romance.

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