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University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Translations and Translation Studies in the Russian, Eastern European & Eurasian Context: From Russian

A Brief Overview of the Field, and A Guide to Resources for Identifying Translated Works

An excellent starting point

Themselves prolific scholars of Russian literature, Carl Proffer and Ronald Meyer's 1990 bibliography of 19th-century Russian literature in English (Nineteenth-century Russian literature in English : a bibliography of criticism and translations) is notable not only for its (sometimes) annotated entries on translated works, but especially for its extensive bibliographies of English-language criticism of Russian authors, including dissertations.The entries for volumes that contain translations of more than one work usually include the (English) titles of each individual work, even for individual poems, as can be see in the example above, for the poet Afanasii Fet.

 

Translations of well-known authors

Any Russian writer of some significance will usually have a bibliography or two devoted to their works and to criticism thereof, both at home and abroad.  In the case of a world-famous author like Leo Tolstoy, the available bibliographies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, catalogs and other reference sources would fill several library shelves all by themselves.  For our purposes, works such as the Rudomino State Library for Foreign Literature's Khudozhestvennye proizvedeniia L. N. Tolstogo v perevodakh na inostrannye iazyki : otdel'nye zarubezhnye izdaniia : bibliografiia (Moskva, 1961) are of particular interest.  Including over 6,000 entries for collected works, selected works, translations of individual works, readers, and other types of publications in over 45 languages, as well as indexes of titles (both in Russian and in translated form), adaptations, translators, etc., this type of resource should be the first stop for anyone interested in when, how and where a major author's works have been translated.

Bibliographies of Bibliographies

 

 

Bibliographies of bibliographies may seem like something that only a librarian could love, but they are definitely worth researchers' attention, given that they represent a huge amount of time spent combing through catalogs and library collections.  The Russian Academy of Sciences' excellent bibliography of over 150 years' worth of Pushkin bibliographies (G. G. Martynov, Bibliografiia pushkinskoi bibliografii, 1846-2001) includes a 130-page section entitled "Foreign Puschkiniana," consisting of citations to bibliographies of translations of (and commentaries on) Pushkin's works in over 75 countries around the world. 

The bibliographies listed here can save Pushkin scholars an enormous amount of time in determining whether and where a particular story or poem has been translated into a particular language, in addition to the time saved in not having to identify said bibliographies from scratch.  As can be seen in the example below, in some cases, even individual articles in journals or edited volumes are included, as long as they discuss Pushkin translations or Pushkin criticism in a more or less systematic manner.

 

Subject Guide

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