FEW NOTES ON THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KAMASUTRA

Zakharov, Anton

English

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FEW NOTES ON THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KAMASUTRA

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FEW NOTES ON THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KAMASUTRA

Annotation

PII

S086919080000616-4-1

Publication type

Article

Status

Published

Authors

Anton Zakharov Send message

ORCID: 0000-0002-3654-9551

Affiliation:
Leading Research Fellow, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
Professor, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education

Edition

Issue 5

Pages

172-186

Abstract

During the 1960s the Soviet scholar Alexander J. Syrkin had made the first Russian translation of Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra. It was published in 1993. The paper examines few fragments of Syrkin’s translation, II.1.26 (6.26) - about the differences of man’s and woman’s ways of sexual enjoy, VI.6.50 - about the categories of prostitutes, II.1.39-45 (7.1-7) - the chapter “The kinds of sensual love” among them. The paper juxtaposes Syrkin’s Russian translation with several English translations, namely that of Richard Francis Burton and Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot (1883), Alain Danielou (1994), Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (2002), and Lars Martin Fosse (2012). Syrkin’s translation sometimes softens the original text. He occasionally makes use of Sanskrit loan-words for his Russian translation, for example kumbhadasi ‘harlot’, auparistaka ‘oral sex’. In other cases, he translates Sanskrit words by Latin words, e.g. ‘coitus’, penis erecti ‘erection’. Syrkin ’s translation strategy reflects Soviet official and personal ban on the dissemination of obviously sexual information.

Keywords

erotic science, translation problems, philology, censorship, Soviet culture, Sanskrit

Date of publication

01.09.2016

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1236

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GOST	Zakharov A. FEW NOTES ON THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KAMASUTRA // Vostok. Afro-aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost. – 2016. – Issue 5 C. 172-186 .
MLA	Zakharov, Anton "FEW NOTES ON THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KAMASUTRA." Vostok. Afro-aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost. 5 (2016).:172-186.
APA	Zakharov A. (2016). FEW NOTES ON THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KAMASUTRA. Vostok. Afro-aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost. no. 5, pp.172-186


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