10th seminar: Pieter Boulogne

Pieter Boulogne (KU Leuven)

How Indirect Translation Shaped the Early Western European Image of Dostoevsky

Monday, October 28th 2019
18:15 at Jakobi 2-114

"This lecture sheds a light on the productive role of indirect translation in the European discovery of the 19th century Russian novelists in general and Dostoevsky in particular. It appears that in its critical aspect, the plural European reception of Dostoevsky, although initiated in Germany, was dominated by the French critic Vogüé, who in the mid-1880s promoted the Russian novel as an antidote against amoral French naturalism. His critiques popularized Dostoevsky in whole Europe, but not in every sense: whereas the writer’s philanthropy was admired, a consensus existed that some of his features and works left much to be desired. In line with this critical selectiveness, Dostoevsky’s most successful German and French translators, drastically modified the plot lines of Russian source texts."

Everybody is welcome!

Pieter Boulogne is Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at KU Leuven, where he currently teaches Russian Literature, Russian Translation and Consecutive Interpreting Russian-Dutch. He is the Director of CETRA – Centre for Translation Studies, which since 1989 organizes a yearly Research Summer School in Translation Studies. He received his PhD Degree in Slavonic Studies from KU Leuven in 2011, with a dissertation on the early Dutch translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Thereupon, he helped founding the Centre for Russian Studies of KU Leuven as its first Coordinator, he was Lecturer of Russian at the Department of Translators and Interpreters of the University of Antwerp and he trained public service interpreters at the Flemish Integration Agency. During half a decade, until October 2019, he was Visiting Professor of Slavonic Studies at Ghent University. As a researcher, Pieter explores the crossroads of Russian Literature, Descriptive Translation Studies and Reception Studies. His publications deal with various hot and less hot topics of Translation Studies, such as multilingualism, indirect translation, retranslation, voice-over translation, intersemiotical translation, children’s literature, imagology and ideological approaches. Right now, he is poking his nose into the Western European reception of contemporary Russian political performance art.