Andrukhovych’s Autobiographical Text Mystery. Instead of a Story. Ukrainian Culture in Translation

Abstract

The aim of this article is to describe the definition of a “cultural element” and to provide an analysis of the methods used in the translation of Yurii Andrukhovych’s autobiographical text The Secret. Instead of a Novel. The work was published in 2007 by the publishing house Folio in Kharkiv (Ukraine), and it was translated into the Polish language by Michał Petryk. “Cultural elements” mean here those elements of the text that are a part of the culture of a given country. These include such elements as personal and generic titles, phrases, fragments of texts from a country’s literature, statements by famous people related to the important events that happened in the country. They also include the social, political, scientific, and cultural environment, including music, cinematography, and more. Yurii Andrukhovych outlines many of the details that were characteristic for the USSR and tries not to distort the facts. The Secret is an autobiographical novel; therefore, it contains many reminiscences about the Soviet Union, Ukrainian culture, and literature. An autobiography becomes a kind of time machine for him, an attempt to reconstruct the past. Therefore, he pays a lot of attention to the smaller things and tries to convey the details of the atmosphere of the time described. Because of this, the work is saturated with cultural elements that may cause untranslatability. The cultural elements mentioned in Yurii Andrukhovych’s text and the correlation of translation have not been often analysed in the past scientific studies; hence, this creates a need for scientific research. The scope of this study is limited to the group of literary-political cultural elements. The article analyses the methods chosen by the translator and compares the level of equivalence of the translated text to the original; also, it finds the causes of untranslatability of the novel.