ABSTRACT
Though as old as translation itself, collaborative literary translation has only recently come into focus within translation studies (cf. Cordingley and Manning 2017). Ubiquitous yet elusive, collaborative translation is notoriously difficult to generalise about and vastly indeterminate. What we perceive as collaboration often depends on self-reporting, status and power. Many forms of collaboration go unreported and unacknowledged. A glimpse into the collaborative character of translation can be caught in the film The Woman with the Five Elephants, Vadim Jendreyko’s 2009 documentary on the revered Dostoyevsky translator Svetlana Geier (1923–2010), where the help of two elderly friends, acknowledged but uncredited, is crucial to the translation process. There are also cases of acknowledged collaboration that are overstated, obligatory, or gambits for name recognition. As a creative pursuit that both promotes and is propelled by the creative pursuits of another, collaborative literary translation evokes familiar concerns about who did what and who should or should not get credit (Washbourne 2016, 169).
