Textual Criticism of Ostrovsky’s Translations from Latin. Part 1: Terence’s Hecyra and the French Intermediary Translation

Abstract

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.