Articles

Few notes on the Russian translation of Kamasutra

Vostok/Oriens '2016, №5

 
During the 1960s the Soviet scholar Alexander J. Syrkin had made the first Russian translation of Vātsyāyana’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 Daniélou (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 kumbhadāsī ‘harlot,’ aupariṣṭaka ‘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

Pages: С. 172–186