Enn Soosaare tõlketegudest
Enn Soosaar’s Acts of Translation

Summary/Abstract: As translation history addresses the issue of social causation and since only humans have the kind of responsibility appropriate to that, it is reasonable to focus on translators. Their work has to be studied in its immediate social context in order to understand its performative meaning. The Soviet period in Estonia featured censored and self-censored public writing, whereas the cultural discourse that expressed Estonia’s identification with Western values could be conducted primarily through translation. This reality renders the selective differences between translators significant on both the metatextual and textual levels. Could an Estonian translator serve as an agent of the receiving culture in the Soviet environment of central planning? How could he resist the prevalent cultural discourse of his day and assert his own intellectual opinion? Could he execute translations that would accept ideological differences precluding re-ideologization? These questions were addressed while studying the translations of Enn Soosaar (1937–2010), a writer keenly aware of the value of his translations as weapons of communication trained on their environment. Irrespective of the limitations imposed on his work by the socio-political circumstances, or perhaps, because of them, Soosaar’s translational choices stand out as consistent attempts to question and counteract the officially sanctioned culture repertoire of the day. In Soosaar’s hands, translation was a means of resisting the mainstream political discourse, and his work was received as ‘minor literature’ of a thoroughly political nature and collective value.

• Details
• Contents