Translating Paul Eluard’s political poetry in socialist Bulgaria

Date: 23 March 2011

Time: 17:00

Location: Room 2.22, 65-68 Park Place

Cardiff School of European Languages, Translation and Politics is pleased to announce this public lecture

Krasimira Ivleva INALCO, Paris

Organised by: Cardiff Research Group on Politics of Translating

The study explores how the literary canon in socialist Bulgaria influenced the way Paul Eluard’s poetry book “Pesni za vsički” (“Songs for everybody”) was “transferred” from French into Bulgarian. When Eluard’s work appeared in Bulgaria in 1953, the genre of politically engaged poetry already existed in the Bulgarian literature and was highly appreciated by the canon. However, the way political poems were written in Bulgaria and Eluard’s poetic expression substantially differed, and this had an impact on the translation. The translators deviated from the original in three ways: first, they included an ideological vision of Eluard’s poems; second, they added more poetical nuances to the sober writing of the original; and third, the translations were marked by the translators’ own writing style. These deviations can be explained both by the impact of the broad literary canon and by individual - conscious or unconscious - translator projects.

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