Notes in English retranslations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

Abstract

Abstract This paper focuses on paratextual elements in the form of endnotes and footnotes in four annotated English translations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s most famous novel, The Master and Margarita. The paper aims to analyze the translators’ perception of the reader’s cultural knowledge, what the translators believe the audience might not know that they consider important, and the translators’ ability to recognize Bulgakov’s allusions and references. The paper explores the thematic categories and the content of the notes to evaluate how they introduce the readers to a different cultural environment and to what extent the notes are helpful to the reader. The empirical section is based on an analysis of more than five hundred footnotes and endnotes divided into thematic categories. The importance of notes in understanding translators’ decisions based on assumptions about what may be unfamiliar to the target audience has been extensively researched (Toledano-Buendia 2013; Landers 2001; Sanchez Ortiz 2015; Pellatt 2013). No scholarly attention has so far been paid to any paratextual material connected to the English translations of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which is one of the most often retranslated works of fiction of Russian classics.