Interpretation of the Road and Associated Realities in the First French Translation of Mikhail Lermontov’s Novel “A Hero of Our Time”

Abstract

The anthropological turn in humanitarian thought stimulated the interest in studying the linguistic personality and individual translator's style. The paper analyses that of A. A. Stolypin (Mongo), a well-known person to the specialists of Russian literature due to his relationships with Mikhail Lermontov, a famous Russian poet. The publication of Lermontov’s novel “A Hero of Our Time” became at the time a significant event in the emerging literary life of Russia marked by Western aesthetic influences. The first French translation of this emblematic novel appeared in 1843 in the Parisian newspaper “La Démocratie pacifique: journal des intérêts des gouvernements et des peuples”. It was made by mentioned above A. A. Stolypin (Mongo), the poet’s close relative and comrade-in-arms who had reasons to leave Russia for some time. The philologists have long known about this translation, but it never became the subject of a close analysis. Filling the existing gap, we aim to introduce this notable translation into scientific circulation. The present paper is part of our research project which is based on Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope, since the road chronotope is a crucial component of Lermontov’s novel. Coupled with the concept of “thematic grid” by I. V. Arnold, it forms the theoretical framework for the current study. To enhance its statistical validity, we trans-formed the Russian edition of the novel and Stolypin’s French translation into digital research corpus. Through the lens of the above theoretical tools, we view the most frequent lexical units denominating the specific road realities, including those of the North Caucasus, as they are key thematic characteristics of time and place. Therefore, their interpretation may serve to evaluate the reproducibility of the “thematic grid” and reveal the nature of the most consistently repeated trаnslator’s solutions. An additional contextual analysis using the reverse translation completes the data and serves for a more detailed and contrasted illustration of the translator’s style. Our analysis reveals the existence of a certain “blurring” of the “thematic grid” in the target text generally due to the use of specification of meaning, hyponyms instead of terms with a broader meaning. But this feature of Stolypin’s translator style does not hinder the adequate recreation of the source text and allows the reader to feel the originality of the time and space in which the events, closely related to the Caucasus Mountain region, developed.