About the author:
Tatiana V. Victoroff, DSc in Philology, Professor, Université de Strasbourg, Faculté des Lettres. Bâtiment Le Portique, 14 Rue René Descartes, BP 80010 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, France; literary director, publishing house YMCA-Press, 11 rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève, 75005 Paris, France.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2607-7693
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Abstract:
The paper deals with the work of Maurice Donzel as translator (pen-name Parijanine). A witness of the Russian Revolution, translator of Lenin and Trotsky, on returning to France he continued to collaborate with the communist press and became the first and chief translator of Ivan Bounine. Based on correspondence between M. Donzel with Ivan Bounine from the Russian archive in Leeds, of Ivan Bounine with R. Rolland and M. Donzel with M. Martinet from the manuscript collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris the paper shows efforts made not only to translate Bounine into French but also to translate him into a different ideological camp. In 1923 such an approach seemed possible as shown by the publication of the story “The mad artist” (“Le fol artiste”, transl. M. Parijanine) in the first issue of the journal “Europe” and also in the nascent cooperation with Romain Rolland. The paper analyses the characteristics of this translation, where Bounine’s parody “birth of a new man” becomes “Nativity of the New Man!” At the same time Bounine’s translator applies all his knowledge of languages and ideological codes to trans-late the “counter-revolutionary” in his milieu Bounine from “forbidden” to “acceptable reading”, suggesting raising to Bounine’s level as well as “appropriating” him to the cause. The appendix is a first publication of correspondence between M. Donzel and his colleagues from “L’Humanité”, of correspondence between Ivan Bounine and Romain Rolland and extracts from the diaries of Romain Rolland, 1922–1923 and 1928.