Translation and Totalitarianism: The Case of Soviet Estonia

The cultural turn in TS has convincingly shown that without paying attention to the historical, social and cultural circumstances of translation we are not able to grasp the rationale of what and how has been translated in a certain location. Translations are to be read in their immediate historical context in order to understand the workings of their meaning in both the past and the present. But history cannot be narrated from any ideologically polished point of view. Translations produced under conditions of state control – as was the case in the Soviet period of Estonia (1940–1991) – tend to be often read relying on the dichotomous oppositions such as official vs counter-culture or conformist vs non-conformist. Yet for this 50-year period these binary structures do not work and are often not able to explain the dissonances that research into translation has introduced into a more nuanced understanding of history.

My talk will focus on the period known in Soviet historiography as the Khrushchevian thaw (late 1950s–1960s) that followed Stalinist repressions and preceded Brezhnevian stagnation. I will draw my material from the memoirs of the then practicing translators, and from the archives of the Estonian Literary Museum that preserve the manuscripts of translations and the correspondence of the publishing houses. These will be compared to my present reading of a few translations as these were published in a legendary supplement of an Estonian cultural monthly.

Anne Lange is an Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Tallinn University, Estonia. Her doctoral dissertation (2007) was on the poetics of the translations of Ants Oras, an influential Estonian translator and literary critic of the 1930s.  She currently works with the history of translation in Estonia in the Soviet period, finding the historical perspective of significance for Translation Studies, and Translation Studies of relevance for knowledge of history. She has also worked as a freelance translator and continues translating fiction, drama, and academic texts into Estonian.