West enters East: A strange case of unequal equivalences in Soviet translation theory Nune Ayvazyan and Anthony Pym 1 Universitat Rovira i Virgili Tarragona, Spain nune.ayvazyan@urv.cat, anthony.pym@urv.cat Version 4.1. September 2015 Translation Studies developed on both sides of the Cold War with a remarkable lack of comparative perspectives, often as two separate hubs. Soviet thinking about translation was nevertheless influenced by Western theories in the mid 1970s, generally coinciding with renewed promises from machine translation and a thaw in Cold War relations. The Soviet discourse of “exactitude” and “adequacy” was thus put into contact with a recent Western discourse based on “transformation” and “equivalence”. Evidence of this can be seen in the history of the term “equivalence”, which prior to the 1970s broadly implied one-to-one correspondence, and yet after the 1970s was more generally understood as the textual result, on whatever level, of linguistic transformation. Revolutionary beginnings Our story starts with a key date: the October Revolution of 1917 shaped the political, social and economic future of eastern European countries for the following seventy years or so. It also created a favorable atmosphere for avant-garde thinking and performance, resulting in major advances in astronomy, physics, aesthetics, linguistics and many other fields. One area of progress was the as yet undefined field of Translation Studies, where a large-scale literary project was to propel advances. The ambitious Vsemirnaya literatura [World Literature] project originated in 1918 (CHUKOVSKIY 1941/2001: 7), right after the Revolution, with the aim of (re)translating into Russian the major literary classics of the 18 th to 20 th centuries. The general argument was that the existing translations were not as good as they should be: poems had been presented in prose, and fiction had been transferred in a highly literal fashion. Previous translations were thus written off as “primitive and unprincipled” (NOVIKOVA 2012: 73), as the work of amateur translators with limited translation skills. It would be logical to assume that all the new translations would be made to adhere to the newly introduced Socialist ideology. After all, the project was financed thanks to a financial agreement between Gorkiy and Lunacharskiy, the highly educated People’s Commissar for Enlightenment (for “Narkompros”, which could also be “Education and Culture”), who had studied in Zurich, could read some eight languages, and genuinely cared about educating the proletariat (which might indeed be a reason for retaining “Enlightenment” 1 This article was the object of a discussion session on Academia in August and September 2015, with some 337 attendees and 55 comments (https://www.academia.edu/s/0405e58386). Changes to the text have been made as a result of comments by Maria Kunilovskaya, Elena Gheorghita, Michael Betsch, Tony Hartley and Birgitta Englund-Dimitrova, to whom our sincere gratitude.