Copyright

Eugenia Kelbert

Published On

2023-11-14

Page Range

pp. 750–775

Language

  • English

Print Length

26 pages

17. Appearing Jane, in Russian

Chapter of: Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages(pp. 750–775)
How Russian is Russian Jane Eyre? To what extent does a new translation reimagine the protagonist? This essay considers translation variation through the example of Jane’s physical appearance in the six Russian translations of Jane Eyre. It argues that translation variation affects interpretation in crucial yet often undetected ways with a focus on special cases like Jane’s, of a narrator-protagonist whose looks are deliberately ambiguous in the original, from her irregular features to the colour of her eyes.

Contributors

Eugenia Kelbert

(author)
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University of East Anglia
Co-Director of UEA’s East Centre for the study of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet space at University of East Anglia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6585-7588

Eugenia Kelbert is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of East Anglia and Co-Director of UEA’s East Centre for the study of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet space. She specialises in comparative literature, translation studies, literary bilingualism, modernism, poetry, stylistics and digital humanities (especially stylometry). Her dissertation on translingual literature (Yale University, 2015) won the ACLA’s Charles Bernheimer Prize; she is completing a monograph on translingualism and researching a second book project on translation and cross-lingual stylistics. Other projects include recent and forthcoming publications, notably, in Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, Meta: Translators’ Journal, and Modernism/Modernity.