Translating the homoerotic from and into Russian: Valerii Pereleshin’s translation of “Imitation of the Arabic”, Alexandrian Songs and “Antinous”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2317-4765.rus.2020.176144Keywords:
Valerii Pereleshin, Poetic translation, Translation of queer texts, Ventriloquism, Russian homoerotic literatureAbstract
The translation of a text with homoerotic content reveals complex political, social and cultural contestation in the transnationalization of sexual desire and identity. This article examines the translations of homoerotic poetry by Russian émigré writer Valerii Pereleshin from and into Russian. Pereleshin’s different approaches in his inverse translation (Pushkin’s “Imitating the Arabic” and Kuzmin’s Alexandrian Songs) and direct translation (Pessoa’s “Antinous”) demonstrate how translation choices are governed by the interplay of discourses of same-sex desires in different cultural contexts, as well the poet-translator’s expression of sexual otherness.
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