BAZAROV AS A ‘NEW MAN’ IN TRANSLATION: SPEECH CHARACTERIZATION OF THE HERO IN VERSIONS BY SCHUYLER, HARE AND THE SLATERS

Abstract

The article examines the rendering of E.V. Bazarov’s speech characteristics in three English-language translations of I.S. Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons”: Eugene Schuyler (1867), Richard Hare, and Nicholas Pasternak Slater with Maya Slater (2022). The relevance of this work stems from the fact that the character’s speech behavior as a system remains understudied in translation studies. The protagonist’s speech behavior is examined as a holistic system of techniques: brief commands, familiar address, understated assessments, a refusal of ceremony, a dry defense against emotion, and an abrupt end. Using seven key episodes, translation decisions are compared to reveal how the norms of each era influence the protagonist’s speech portrait. The unit of analysis is a speech fragment, including tone, syntax, social orientation, and the position of a line in a conflict. The authors conclude that Eugene Schuyler’s translation raises his register, bringing the character’s speech into line with the literary norms of the era; translator Richard Hare stabilizes the tone, making his lines sound more collected than Turgenev’s; and Nicholas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater update the conversational tone while maintaining historical distance. This shows the possibilities of different translation traditions in the process of translating the novel “Fathers and Sons” by the classic of Russian literature I.S. Turgenev.