La poesía de las vanguardias rusas en español: cuando el contexto social demanda la traducción
The Poetry of the Russian Avant-Garde in Spanish: When the Social Context Demands the Translation

Author(s): Alexandra Cheveleva Dergacheva
Subject(s): Language studies, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Russian poetry; Spanish poetry; avant-garde poetry; poetic translation; discourse of literary translation; The Russian Silver Age
Summary/Abstract: The main objective of this paper is to study the connection between the interest in the translation of the Russian avant-garde poetry of the Silver Age (approximately the period between the year 1892 and the 1930s) and the characteristics of the historical and social processes in the target language countries. The paper evaluates different ways of defining the term avant-garde in the Russian literary context, and then offers, following the proposal of the Russian researchers Valeri Tyupa and Serguei Biryukov, to determine this phenomenon through discourse analysis. The reflection of a sudden change in one culture (as it was the political-sociocultural process of the early 20th century in Russia) which influenced the literature and especially the poetry of this period and their subsequent translations, is considered in another culture and another social environment by analyzing the dynamics of translation of different poets, such as Mayakovsky, Blok, Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov and Tsvetaeva. The reception of these poetic texts in Spanish-speaking countries is studied as the assimilation of cultural texts, regarding the causes of social demand to translate one or another avant-garde text. Finally, the social causes of translation are considered through studying the works of Cesar Arconada, Nicanor Parra and other important figures of Spanish language poetry, as well as translations made by professional translators (José Fernández Sánchez, Selma Ancira, etc.) and amateurs. It is demonstrated that the existence of a sociocultural demand of certain characteristics is necessary to make the literary translation possible.

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