2017 > Вісник Дніпровського Університету ім. Альфреда Нобеля. Сер.: Філологічні науки. — Вип. 2 (14), Дніпро, 2017. — С. 65–69.

As is generally known, a title is an extremely important component of any text, including literary works. Its essential relationship with the content and message of a book has been realized in various ways throughout history; nevertheless, there are common functions of the title that persist across literary epochs, styles, and genres. A title is always an icon—in the semiotic sense of the word—of the book, while simultaneously serving as its first word or words.
As Sigismund Krzhyzhanovsky insightfully remarked, “The title treats the book so, as it treats its speech material.” He added a kind of explanatory comment: “The title operates with the words of the book as it treats things and events, taken from space and time.” This observation highlights the inseparable link between a title and the textual world it represents.
Certainly, the functions of a title may vary within different stylistic trends or genres. For instance, titles that indicate the genre of a text were characteristic of Old Russian literature. As noted, “…the genres of Old Russian literature were well ‘organized’ in the respect that they were usually marked declaratively in the titles of the literary works” [1, p. 61]. Later, such explicit genre markers became the exception rather than the rule, though examples of this type of entitling can still be found in Russian as well as other national literatures of the 17th–20th centuries.
The moralizing function of the title was particularly prevalent in European Neoclassical literature; one needs only to recall the titles of several comedies by Molière. In the fiction of the Age of Enlightenment, however, deviations from this convention were not uncommon—for example, the use of the word History in three novels by Henry Fielding, or Life and Opinions in the first novel by Laurence Sterne. An extra-textual character of the title, detached from the immediate narrative, became possible and even typical considerably later, especially in postmodernist fiction.
Undoubtedly, the iconic function of a title determines the importance of its accurate translation into foreign languages. Numerous translators, attempting to preserve the essence of the content in the title, often failed: their variants were ponderous, sometimes odd, and frequently bore little resemblance to the original. A humorous example of this is the Russian translation of Shakespeare’s comedy Merry Wives of Windsor made by Empress Catherine the Great: “That is How to Have a Basket and Clothes” (Vot kakovo imet’ korzinu i beljo) [2, p. 13].
The first title that Alexander Griboyedov had chosen for his comedy was “Woe to Wit” (Gore umu). A. Slonimsky considered this phrase semantically equivalent to another, more moralizing formulation: “The Punished Free-thinker” (Nakazannyj Vol’nodumets) [3, p. 61], which aligns more closely with the traditions of Neoclassical dramaturgy. However, the playwright later changed the syntactic arrangement of the words and adopted the alternative title under which the comedy became widely known to both Russian and foreign readers and audiences. By the end of the 19th century, and especially in the 20th century, this second title acquired the quality of a fixed phraseological expression and entered Russian phraseology, along with numerous phrases and lines from the comedy itself. Many of these verses effectively “became proverbs,” confirming the prescient observation of the perceptive Alexander Pushkin [4, p. 127].
The history of British and American translators’ interest in Griboyedov’s comedy spans more than a century and a half. The first attempt to introduce the English-speaking audience to the work occurred in Great Britain in 1857 [5]. The translator, Nikolaj Dmitrievich Benardaki, rendered the title simply by transliteration, evidently believing that the phraseological unit could not be adequately translated into English. Almost half a century later, Leo Wiener included five scenes from the second act of the comedy in his two-volume Anthology of Russian Literature (in English), rendering them in prose under the title “Intelligence Comes to Grief.” Later, he published a full prose translation of the comedy as a separate book entitled “The Misfortune of Being Clever.”
In 1924, the British journal Slavonic Review published the first successful poetic translation of the comedy, executed by Sir Bernard Pares; a year later, this version appeared as a separate book [6]. The edition included an introduction by the eminent scholar of Russian and European literatures D.S. Mirsky (Svyatopolk-Mirsky), then residing in England, who clearly advised the translator. Pares’s translation remained the most popular and widely used English version in pedagogical and theatrical practice for more than thirty years.
Despite the indisputable merits of Bernard Pares’s work, it was not the final attempt to render Griboyedov’s comedy into English. In the second half of the 20th century, several new translations appeared. In 1961, Franklin D. Reeve’s translation was published under the title “The Trouble with Reason” [7]. Ten years later, Joshua Cooper produced a version for the Penguin Books series titled “Chatsky, or the Misery of Having Mind” [8]. Both Reeve’s and Cooper’s translations underwent multiple editions during the last third of the century.
On the eve of Griboyedov’s bicentennial, celebrated in 1995, interest among British and American translators revived. In 1992, two new so-called “acting versions” appeared almost simultaneously. One was produced by the prominent English novelist Anthony Burgess, entitled “Chatsky (The Importance of Being Stupid)” [9]. The other was by American playwright Alan Shaw, known primarily for his libretto for the musical My Fair Lady, based on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw’s version was titled “The Woes of Wit” [10]. In 1993, a new bilingual edition was published in New York, translated by Beatrice Yusem [11]. Her rendition, on a level with Sir Bernard Pares’s classic version, is widely regarded as one of the most semantically and stylistically accurate English translations of Griboyedov’s famous comedy. The title in her translation reads: “Distress from Cleverness.”
The beginning of the third millennium was marked by the appearance in Great Britain and the USA of some new versions, among which the work of Mary Hobson must be distinguished. It was published by the solid American publishing house “Edwin Mellen Press” [12]. The translator received the jubilee Griboyedov Prize for this work and later was awarded the memorable Pushkin medal in Russia.
The list of translations and renditions convinces of the fact that the intensive search for a more or less adequate analogue for Griboyedov’s title in the English language appeared to be not such a simple task for British and American translators. Exact coincidences in their variants can be met comparatively rarely. Only Alan Shaw and Mary Hobson chose the same English words for the title, but the author of the earlier rendition used the word “Woe” in plural, somewhat domesticating and lowering the sense of the whole set expression, while the newest translator, not without reason, preserves the singular form in accordance with the Russian original text.
Other cases of coincidences are not noted, but there are similar variants. Meanwhile, every next author tries to escape the literal reiteration of previous translations, changing the common words in the analogical syntactical constructions to synonyms. For instance: “The Misfortune of Being Clever” (Leo Wiener), “The Mischief of Being Clever” (Bernard Pares), “The Misery of Having a Mind” (Joshua Cooper), “The Trouble with Reason” (Franklin Reeve), “Distress from Cleverness” (Beatrice Yusem). It is noteworthy that Bernard Pares adds in brackets to the English translation a transliteration of the original Russian title; methinks that such an addition can be intended for specialists or Russian-speaking readers, but tells little to the wide audience in Great Britain, countries of the Commonwealth, and the USA. It should be said in all fairness that the collocations chosen by Franklin Reeve and Beatrice Yusem have not, incidentally, been used in any of the preceding or subsequent versions.
Joshua Cooper’s variant also needs some reservations. Here the name of the protagonist precedes the original formula – “Chatsky, or the Misery of Having a Mind”. It may be supposed that by placing the name of the main personage at the beginning of the title, Cooper tried to smooth possible impressions from the further clumsy translation of Griboyedov’s title proper. But another reason is also possible. As far as the title itself refers mainly to the protagonist of the play, the appearance of his name in the first line of the work could be natural and reasonable. Besides, the translator, who knew the Russian text of the play quite well, comprehended its organic, genetic relationship with the tradition of West-European high comedy [13], for which titles of this kind were rather typical.
In the translation of Anthony Burgess, the most interesting is the second part of the title, which is put in brackets – “The Importance of Being Stupid”. Undoubtedly, this word combination was addressed first of all to potential spectators, the experienced theatre-goers, and last but by no means least – to theatrical directors. This non-standard and significant subtitle brings to mind associations with Oscar Wilde’s witty comedy “The Importance of Being Earnest”.
Formally effective, Anthony Burgess’s subtitle has little in common with the original Russian title and, besides, clearly shifts the semantic accent and creates a certain antithesis between the title and subtitle. The artificial correlation of satirical and moralizing drama by Griboyedov with the brilliant “cup and saucer comedy” of Oscar Wilde is absolutely unfounded, either historically or stylistically; it breaks the relationship between the title and the body of the text.
Though occasionally literalism can be useful in the rendering of the title, it is impossible to expect over-literal variants from the newest translators, especially in reproducing the title. The phraseological combination, which became a real phraseological unit in the author’s language, can easily turn into absurdity in the language of translation, where quite different phraseological and literary traditions become apparent. However, the translators’ freedom of ignoring the literal approach to the original text must be reasonably limited. Within these limits the associative semantic relationship between the chosen title and the content of the literary work must be in essence preserved. Sharp stylistic and especially semantic discrepancy between the title and the body of the text is scarcely permissible.
There need be no doubts that in the English-speaking world the keen and talented translators will try to create new English versions of Griboyedov’s comedy, which is surely doomed to the long life in literature and theatre, as it is proved by the history of culture for the last almost two centuries. In spite of all their respect for the predecessors’ works, translators of the next generations will evaluate some moments in the previous versions critically, the more so as English language is not an unalterable system. It is obvious that the searchings for an adequate (semantically and stylistically) analogue for the title of the play will remain one of the most difficult tasks.