Performative Translation Options Under The Soviet Regime

Translations must be read in their immediate social context in order to understand their performative meaning. The Soviet period in Estonia featured censored and self-censored public writing, whereas cultural discourse that doubted the hegemonic ideology could be conducted primarily through translation. This reality renders significant the selective differences between translators on both the metatextual and textual levels. The topic of this article is the translations of Enn Soosaar (1937–2010), a writer keenly aware of the value of his translations as weapons of communication trained on their environment.