On Translating Bernard Shaw’s <i>Arms and the Man</i> in Bulgarian

ABSTRACT Unlike many of Bernard Shaw’s more prominent plays, Arms and the Man, his only play with a Bulgarian connection, remained untranslated into Bulgarian for more than a century. In this article, the author highlights his and his co-translator’s experiences in translating the play into Bulgarian. The article focuses on the challenges of translating specific stylistic idiosyncrasies of the play, including cultural referents, unconventional syntax, and punctuation.</jats:p

The Eastern Question, Western Europe, and the Balkans in Fin-de-Siècle Literature.

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2009. Major: English. Advisor: Professor Andrew Elfenbein. 1 computer file (PDF); v, 158 pages.Traditionally, the British Empire is studied through the lens of British imperial rule in Asia, Africa, or the Americas, while scholars brush aside what was the vortex of British foreign policy in the second half of the nineteenth century—the Eastern Question, or the question of what to do with the Southeastern European subject peoples of the “decaying” Ottoman Empire. Reading closely late nineteenth-century British and Balkan expository prose and fiction that deal exclusively with the Eastern Question, I demonstrate that in the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain’s foreign policy was formed not only in the context of its interests overseas, but also, and perhaps more significantly, in the context of other existing empires in central Europe, as well as in the near east, such as the Russian and the Ottoman. A defining concern of this dissertation is also to demonstrate that the Balkans’ image of the other within Europe is largely a post-Enlightenment Western European construction that was discursively hardened at the end of the nineteenth century by both Western European and Balkan intellectuals. In discursive terms, I claim, this image was virtually parallel to Orientalist constructions of Western Europe’s colonial territories in Asia or Africa. My claim stems from reading in dialogue late nineteenth-century Western European texts (Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and Balkan texts (Aleko Konstantinov’s Bai Ganio and Dobri Voinikov’s The Misunderstood Civilization). I position these texts in relation to a critical discourse of nationalism and empire, as well as examine how these texts reflect or reconstruct these notions’ accepted meanings and connotations in the second half of the nineteenth century

The British Empire Revisited Through the Lens of the Eastern Question

The Bulgarians are rendered helpless in the rhetoric of the Bulgarian Agitation, a movement in Britain that produced numerous texts in response to the Ottoman massacre of thousands of Bulgarians after their uprising in April 1876. The compassion shown for the Bulgarian victims in the rhetoric of the Agitation is sincere only in moral and humane terms; open and direct political solidarity with the Bulgarians’ strident appeals for independence is missing from it. Even the morally and culturally charged pro-Agitation arguments launched by Gladstone and his followers conformed to British national interests, especially as contrasted to Bulgarian viewpoints