4.     Literary translation in Ukraine prior to Soviet rule.

Thus on the territory of Ukraine until the end of the

eighteenth century, the local written standard was the so-called
knyzhna mova (‘book language’), with many elements of Church
Slavonic, Polish, and other influences which differed
significantly from the spoken vernacular in all its regional
variations.
The text that began the history of modern vernacular
Ukrainian literature was Ivan Kotliarevs’kyi’s Eneïda, a
travestied translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. The first three parts of
this work were published in 1798, and therefore a translation,
albeit an unusual one, came to be the foundation of modern
standard Ukrainian language and Ukrainian literature.
To understand better the choices made by translators, both
in terms of the works selected and the linguistic resources
employed, it is critical to consider their intended audiences, as
Strikha rightly notes.
In the early decades of the nine- teenth century, literacy
levels in Ukraine were but a fraction of those some two centu-
ries earlier (in the seventeenth century, Ukrainians enjoyed one
of the highest literacy rates in Europe, but over the course of
Russian colonial rule their literacy levels plum- meted,
becoming ONE OF THE LOWEST ON the continent).
Thus when in the late eighteenth – early nineteenth
century Ukrainian authors produced translations of Virgil,
Horace, Pushkin, and Mickiewicz, their goal was not to bring
these texts to a new audience, but rather to make their audience
appreciate the capacity of their native language to express these
familiar texts. In other words, it was an argument for
strengthening their national aspirations.
In this respect, the activity of the Ukrainian translators
paralleled those in many other Eastern and Central European
nations of their time. Indeed, there is much in common between
their efforts and those of early nineteenth-century German
translators, who were busy rendering Homer, Plato, and
Shakespeare into German.
The Ukrainian translators, just like their Czech, Hungarian,
and numerous other East European counterparts, sought to bring
the educated strata of their societies back to their native
language.
Turning back to early nineteenth-century Ukraine,
however, we would find that the local translations, as
epitomized by Petro Hulak-Artemovs’kyi’s rendering of
Horace’s odes, continued the line of travestied translations
begun by Kotliarevs’kyi. While their success is not comparable
with that of Kotliarevs’kyi’s ver- sion of The Aeneid, they came
to be appreciated by a very broad stratum of society – yet they
also REINFORCED THE STEREOTYPE OF UKRAINIAN AS
A “CRUDE,” COMEDIC LANGUAGE.
Despite the dominance of travestied comedic texts in
Ukrainian letters in the early decades of the nineteenth
century, already by the 1830s we see successful attempts at
developing other literary registers. Strikha draws particular
attention to the translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s sonnet
“Akkerman Steppe” (“Stepy akermańskie”) published
anonymously in 1830 and usually attributed to the Ukrainian
poet Levko Borovykovs’kyi, arguing that this text displays all
the signs of a translation congenial to the tone and style of the
original.
Within just a few years, with the arrival of TARAS
SHEVCHENKO on the Ukrainian literary scene in the late
1830s and the publication of his first book of poetry in 1840, the
debates on whether Ukrainian- language writing was capable of
a diversity of styles and speech registers had ceased.
In Shevchenko’s works, translations proper occupy a
relatively small part (several Psalms, some passages from the
Bible, fragments of the Medieval Russian epic The Tale of
Igor’s Campaign). However, translation projects occupied a
central role in the work of Shevchenko’s sometime friend,
sometime rival Panteleimon Kulish. Kulish’s accomplishments
included designing the first modern Ukrainian orthography,
writing the first Ukrainian-language historical novel, and
starting the first Ukrainian- language periodical in the Russian
Empire. Yet translation was invariably one of his central
preoccupations.
The new flourishing of Ukrainian letters in the late 1850s –
early 1860s came to an abrupt halt with the adoption of the so-
called VALUEV CIRCULAR OF 1863, named for the then
Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire.
Then in 1876, Alexander II signed the so-called EMS
EDICT, which specifically banned the publication of
translations into Ukrainian, as well as the importation of
Ukrainian-language publications from abroad; additionally, the
edict banned Ukrainian-language theater performances, and the
printing of musical scores with Ukrainian text.
 The initial consequences of these restrictive measures on
Ukrainian cultural life were devastating.
Yet these restrictions also galvanized Ukrainian activities
in Galicia and among the émigrés in Western Europe. Even in
the Russian-ruled territory, many writers and translators
continued their work, and many of their texts successfully made
it to publishing venues in the West, and under the fairly liberal
conditions of Habsburg rule Galicia became a lively center of
Ukrainian-language publication of both books and periodicals.
Morachevs’kyi’s translations of the four Gospels were
printed, with the church’s official sanction, only after the 1905
repeal of the ban on Ukrainian-language publications, and long
after the translator’s death.
The first complete translation of the Bible into Ukrainian
was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1903,
the result of more than thirty years of efforts by Kulish and Ivan
Puliui ,and the writer Ivan Nechui-Levyts’kyi.
Alongside the Bible, Shakespeare was Kulish’s other main
translation project, although in his lifetime he was able to
publish only one volume, in 1882, containing his versions of
Othello, The Comedy of Errors, and Troilus and Cressida.
Kulish launched what Strikha terms the “BAROQUE”
APPROACH TO TRANSLATION, which emphasizes
experimentation with vocabulary and style over smooth
readability.
Ukrainian translation of a Shakespeare play saw the light of
day: Hamlet by Mykhailo Staryts’kyi (1840– 1904). Its effect
was truly explosive, as the translator successfully navigated all
the obstacles of censorship in the post-Ems era and had the text
published in Russia.
Overall, however, this rendition came to be valued highly
by later generations of critics and translators, and to be regarded
as the beginning of another paradigm of Ukrainian literary
translation, with its emphasis on lucidity and precision, and a
very sparing use of dialectalisms and archaisms – what Strikha
terms the “classical,” or “mainstream” school .Both schools, the
“classical” and the “baroque,” thus date back to roughly the
same period (late 1870s – early 1880s)
Simultaneously, as Strikha notes, in the 1890s translation
shifted from being a preoccupation of a few individual authors
to a major segment of the mainstream literary process.
In addition to literary texts,translators now turned to
scholarly texts in the humanities, social, and natural sciences,
and in the liberal conditions of Austrian rule in Galicia, book
editions of translations, by the early 1900s, ranged from
Shakespeare and Dante to Marx and Engels, to Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy, and Chekhov, and to Hugo, Zola, and Maupassant.
The bibliography of translations by Ivan Franko alone,
Western Ukraine’s leading literary figure of that era, runs to
dozens of pages. Critical essays on the subject of translation
were also becoming more common. Lesia Ukrainka’s and
Ahatanhel Kryms’kyi translation contribution was also very
important.
The outbreak of World War I brought these
developments to a halt, as the ban on Ukrainian-language
publications was reintroduced.