The Opening Verses of the Tale of Igor’s Campaign in Its Bulgarian Translations

This article presents a comparison of the opening verses of the famous anonymous work of ancient Russian literature, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, translated into Bulgarian by four different translators in the course of more than a century: Efrem Karanov (1898), Lyudmil Stoyanov (1954), Kiril Kadiyski (1985), and Krasimir Georgiev (2015). The main goal is to analyze the changes in translation decisions and identify any possible deviations from the source text. Special attention is paid to the strategies employed by the translators to convey the meaning of several challenging passages in the ancient text. The present study considers some issues in the process of translation such as the use of different clause construction: the difference between number in the original text and their number in the translated one; the separation of one sentence into two in the process of translation, as well as the free use of punctuation marks by the translators. What is also analyzed is the problem of title translation from an old Russian language into a language comprehensible to any reader contemporary with the translators. The lack of an original, the impossible dating of the work, the unknown author and other elements of the work gave a certain freedom of the translators to express their own style.