“Shagi / Steps” the Journal of the SASH

SHAGI/STEPS 6(3)

Keywords: Shakespeare, Pasternak, translation, manuscript, print edition, first and subsequent editions, Othello, Iago, Desdemona, Emilia

Abstract: The article compares different translations of Shakespeare’s Othello: The Moor of Venice done by Boris Pasternak. The article presents different variants in editions published during Pasternak’s lifetime, analyzes the nature of these discrepancies and discusses the main tendencies that led Pasternak to his continuous corrections. The author notes the contradiction between the translator’s desire to render the vivacity and spontaneity of conversational intonations and his simultaneous wish for maximum smoothness of dramatic dialogues. The differing printed versions of Othello are compared with a final draft that has never been published or analyzed. The author arrives at the conclusion about the purposeful nature of the changes Pasternak was making and how they influenced the genre of Shakespeare’s play. The article notes that, as Pasternak was correcting his previous versions, the style of speech that he was choosing for Shakespearean characters’ discourse was changing as well: from a very emotional, colloquial style with plenty of low style vocabulary and a large number of ellipses that expressed the characters’ intense state of mind towards a more rational and neutral style. As a result of this transformation, one can see a consistent replacement of tragedy with melodrama that has some elements of sentimentality like a bourgeois drama. This brought the translation closer to modernity but at the same time distanced it from the original. Based on the conclusions drawn in the article, except for some details the original, handwritten version of Boris Pasternak’s translation is seen as preferable.

To cite this article: Poplavskiy, V. R. (2020). Boris Pasternak’s translation of Othello: The 1944 manuscript. Shagi/Steps, 6(3), 50–58. DOI: 10.22394/2412-9410-2020-6-3-50-58.