To the issue of intertextuality translation in the contemporary Russian poetry: A case study of the French translation of Lev Rubinshtein's "Music-Making at Home", 1986

Abstract

This report studies the problem of the French translation of a text belonging to the Russian "contemporary" poetry where intertextual playing is obvious and it is a basis for the sense system. The translator's objective is to find French equivalents for the "substandard" citations of classical Russian poems that make up the matter of that "home music" in the context of the "big Soviet communal apartment" of the later period. This purposeful substandardisation contains the hidden historical and political sense of Lev Rubinshtein's text. It proves impossible to make French people understand the hidden reference to the feeling of the collapse of the Russian culture and the depletion of the Russian word, together with the hope to recover them by unexpected connections, laughter and a variety of voices.