Modernising the Ukrainian Language through the Power of Translation: Ihor Kostetskyi’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Lada Kolomiyets

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.31.09

Authors

Lada Kolomiyets Dartmouth College https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5760-6159

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.31.09

Keywords:

Shakespeare’s sonnets, Artistic Ukrainian Movement, conventional stylisation, absolutisation, estrangement

Abstract

A translation project of Shakespeare’s sonnets undertaken by a prominent representative of the Ukrainian diaspora in Western Europe, Ihor Kostetskyi, aimed to reconstruct and revitalise the modern Ukrainian language through translation in the 1950s. Kostetskyi saw the creative laboratory of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a tool of transformative influence on the state of the Ukrainian literary language, which in the Soviet Union suffered from censorship and countless bans aimed at depriving and Russifying its lexical, grammatical and stylistic diversity. Most Ukrainian writers in the diaspora after the Second World War sought to reconstruct and develop the Ukrainian language. Kostetskyi’s formalist translation of the complete sonnets into a creatively stylised “Shakespearean” Ukrainian is the object of the present study.

Author Biography

Lada Kolomiyets, Dartmouth College

Lada Kolomiyets is a DSc (Philology) in Translation Studies, Professor at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College. Fulbright scholar at the University of Iowa and Pennsylvania State University. An interdisciplinary researcher in literature, culture, and translation studies, with three monographs, several textbooks for graduate students, literary anthologies, numerous chapters in collective volumes, such as Shakespeare in Ukrainian on the other side of the Iron Curtain: in 3 Volumes (Kyiv, 2024), ‘A Sea-Change into Something Rich and Strange’: Shakespeare Studies in Contemporary Ukraine (Lviv and Toruń, 2020). Her books include monographs Conceptual and Methodological Grounds of Contemporary Ukrainian Translations of British, Irish, and North American Poetry (2004) and Ukrainian Literary Translation and Translators in the 1920s-30s (2013, 2nd ed. 2015), edited volumes, book chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Censorship (2024), Translation Studies in Ukraine as an Integral Part of the European Context (2023), etc. She has held fellowships at the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Harris Distinguished Professorship Foundation, and others. She is currently a grant recipient of the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (project title “De/colonizing Ukraine: Practices of Russification and Modes of Resistance 1922–1991”).

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