Article published in:
Contexts of Russian Literary Translation
Edited by Julie Hansen and Susanna Witt
[Translation and Interpreting Studies 11:1] 2016
► pp. 64–80

Smuggling the other

Rita Rait-Kovaleva’s translation of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

The first Russian translation of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) was produced in 1960 by Rita Rait-Kovaleva, a renowned translator of contemporary Western literature (English, French, German) in the Soviet Union. This essay examines Rait’s translation of The Catcher in the Rye in the context of the problem of censorship and translation, focusing on several instances of Rait’s translation of profanities and sex-related passages of The Catcher in the Rye. It demonstrates how the creative strategies of the translator not only helped her overcome censorship barriers but also transformed a foreign text into a new cultural model.

Keywords: translation, Salinger, Rita Rait-Kovaleva, The Catcher in the Rye, censorship
Published online: 31 March 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.11.1.04sem
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