George Lathrop’s Short Story “Left Out” and Its Unknown Translations

Abstract

The journalism boom in the nineteenth century facilitated not only development of a new literary genre, the short story, but also its exchange among various cultures. Magazine editors in different countries were searching for new interesting short stories to translate and publish. In most cases, these translations were carried out in a very short time. As a result, the renditions were not exact and the quality was not particularly high, but they still provided an opportunity for readers to become aware of the lifestyles and literary modes of other nations. This article examines one such American short story – George Parsons Lathrop’s “Left Out” – and the consecutive chain of its translations (French, Russian and Georgian), each of which was based on the previous rendition in the chain. We will provide a short survey of how we established the date of composition of the various versions, and describe how the original American text and its French translation were found. That translation served as the basis for the Russian intermediate text, which in turn served as the basis for the Georgian version. We will conclude with an analysis of the entire series of variants.

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Author Information
Nino Sozashvili, Telavi State University, Georgia
Maia Ninidze, Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature, Georgia

• Category: Humanities - Literature/Literary Studies*

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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