Олена (Olena) Янссон (Jansson): An Account of the Turkish Sultan’s Court: A study of the Textual History and the 17th-century East Slavonic translations

Abstract

The present study explores the textual history of an account describing the Turkish Sultan’s court, focusing primarily on its East Slavic translations from the seventeenth century. Originally an oral description by Rabbi Domenico Hierosolimitano in 1611, the text underwent significant cultural transfer, resulting in numerous revisions and translations into several languages, including French, English, Polish, and Church Slavonic.

In this thesis, the dynamics of the intracultural and intercultural text transfers are examined, with particular emphasis on the roles of various agents in the process, including the author, translators, publishers, copyists, and commissioners. The study traces the text’s evolution through several key stages: Hierosolimitano’s oral account, the subsequent manuscript versions, Alfonso Chierici’s printed edition, Szymon Starowolski’s Polish translation, and six East Slavic manuscript translations (by Ivan Maksimov, Andrei Lyzlov, Mikhail Kropotkin, as well as three anonymous translators). The study also explores later editions of these translations from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

Philological and Translation Studies approaches are employed to describe the East Slavic manuscript translations, identify previously unknown manuscripts, and highlight the role of translators and the contexts in which the translations were created. I demonstrate that Maksimov was the first East Slavic translator of the account and confirm the existence of only six East Slavic translations. Additionally, I locate a previously presumed lost chapter from Lyzlov’s translation and pinpoint manuscripts transmitting its full text. In discussing the reasons for the appearance of these parallel, independent East Slavic translations, I distinguish a number of socio-cultural conditions – both stimulating and inhibiting – as well as the personal preconditions, translation events, and translation acts. To analyze the principles of translation and the cultural interventions introduced by the Polish writer Starowolski and the six East Slavic translators, the concept of intercultural translation is applied. The study documents how each translator adapted the text in accordance with their own religious and cultural perceptions, resulting in linguo-cultural and communicative changes in the text.

The present study contributes to the understanding of cultural transfer, Early Modern translation practices, and the role of East Slavic translations in bridging different religious and cultural traditions.