Search

The article continues the investigation of textological issues associated with the surviving draft translation of the comoedia palliata The Asses (Asinaria) by Plautus, made by A. N. Ostrovsky from Latin. For the translation of Plautus’ Asinaria, the edition remains a problem: arguments are offered both for and against Levée (1820) as the basic source. The article reconstructs in detail the biographical and creative context of this translation, which was supposed to be a contribution to the formation of a democratic theater. The author of the article argues that although we cannot say for sure that Levée was the main or the only source of the translation, a lot in the Russian text says about Ostrovsky’s highly likely intentional repulsion of the Levée’s conception of Roman drama. In Levée’s edition, the French parallel translation and rare commentaries should have made Plautus one of the Latin classics, while Ostrovsky emphasizes the non-classical and lowbrow moments in Plautus. This explains both the decisions in the preparation of the manuscript and a number of accents that he deliberately made in this alleged rejection of the French translation, as well as the refusal to rely on the French translation even in difficult cases and work only with the Latin original, despite the inevitable translation errors.

Ostrovsky’s translations of the works of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, preserved in incomplete drafts, attend to the textual criticism related both to the principles of the work and to its aims. The example of the translation of Terence’s Hecyra in comparison with the earlier translation of Plautus’ Asinaria proves the evolution of Ostrovsky’s translation principles. While Plautus was translated without recourse to an intermediary translation, Terence was translated from the popular bilingual edition, and the translator turned to a French translation in difficult cases. The article explains how Ostrovsky worked further with passages translated from the French or with reference to the French text, in which cases, on the contrary, he translated from the Latin without reference to the French translation, and this course of initial work determined the order of further editing of the rough translation. The self-editing went in the direction of both greater accuracy and expressiveness, which in the case of using an intermediary translation proved to be a clearly contradictory task. Reconstructing the history of the text in light of the identified source of the translation allows us to clarify a number of manuscript readings, to identify the pencil edits as belonging highly likely to Ostrovsky himself, contrary to the opinion of the first publisher of the translation, and to raise the issue of the stage intention of the translation.