Vladimir Nabokov’s English Translation of “The Song of Igor’s Campaign” as a Precedent Situation in Intercultural Communication

The paper deals with the English translation of “The Song of Igor’s Campaign”, carried out by Vladimir Nabokov in the middle of the 20th century. The translation is considered in a linguocultural perspective as a precedent situation (a case) in intercultural communication. Such approach involves not only an analysis of the lexical and syntactical features of the translated medieval text, but also a study of the dynamics of translation activity, which advances in specific historical conditions, depends on certain factors that influence it, and corresponds to certain tasks. The purpose of the paper is to comprehensively analyze Nabokov’s translation of “The Song of Igor’s Campaign” as a dynamic, historically conditioned intellectual process. It aims to characterize its scientific and cultural context, explore the factors shaping the translation concept, and examine the peculiarities of the search for lexical and syntactical resources and the translator’s nominative solutions. The research methodology is based on descriptive and comparative linguistic methods. The author identifies the main factors of the academic and cultural context that influenced the creation of the translation: Nabokov’s pedagogical activity, the intensification of research on the “Song” after the publication of A. Mazon’s book (1940), Nabokov’s interest in translation and scientific work in his “American period”, acquaintance with historical and philological studies on the “Song” and their results. The influence of these factors on the formation of the final conception of translation is shown and the main results of Nabokov’s study of the poetics, the compositional structure of the medieval text and its lexical and syntactical features are characterized. Some of Nabokov’s nominative solutions, his innovative technique for reproducing relevant meanings (lexical, connotative, pragmatic) are discussed. It is concluded that in the process of working on translation, the necessary balance between the strategy of meaning and the strategy of form was achieved.