Sovietisms as cultural, social and historical realia in English retranslations of Bulgakov’s The Fatal Eggs Natalia Kaloh Vid 1 p and Petra Žagar- Soštari c 2 1 University of Maribor, Faculty of Arts, Slovenia 2 University of Rijeka, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Croatia ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER Received: October 21, 2019 • Accepted: March 2, 2021 © 2021 Akademiai Kiado, Budapest ABSTRACT Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastic short story The Fatal Eggs (1925) was translated into English by five trans- lators, Mirra Ginsburg (1964), Kathleen Gook-Horujy (1990), Hugh Aplin (2003), Michael Karpelson (2010), and Roger Cockrell (2011). The emphasis in this research is on the linguistic analysis of the translations of cultural, social and historical realia referred to as Sovietisms, which pertain to items characteristic of Soviet discourse in the 1930s. Bulgakov’s language is brimming with Soviet vocabulary that refers to various cultural and socio-political elements of Soviet reality. A complete naturalization or even omission of Sovietisms may lead to loss of connotative meanings essential to understanding the context, while foreignizing through transliteration or calquing may disturb the fluency of reading. The purpose of the analysis is to assess the translators’ choices and what they imply for the readers. Another aim is to test the assumptions of re-translation theory (Bensimon 1990; Gambier 1994), which states that early trans- lations are more target-oriented than subsequent translations. The analysis employs taxonomies suggested by Vlakhov and Florin (1980) and Mokienko and Nikitina (1998) for the classification of Sovietisms, and Aixela’s taxonomy of translation strategies (1996) as the grounds for the case study. KEYWORDS Bulgakov, The Fatal Eggs, translation, Sovietisms, foreignizing, domesticating, re-translation theory p Corresponding author. E-mail: natalia.vid@um.si Across Languages and Cultures 22 (2021) 2, 233–253 DOI: 10.1556/084.2021.00016 Brought to you by provisional account | Unauthenticated | Downloaded 01/15/22 06:31 AM UTC