Temple, Kościół, Mosque, Church in the Translations of the Quran from the Petrine Era

Summary: 

The article discusses the ways of rendering the lexeme temple in two Russian translations of the Quran of the Peter the Great era. These translations were made from the French translation of the Quran by André Du Ryer, first published in 1647. Du Ryer himself applies in this case the principle of unifying translation, rendering various nominations of the Arabic text denoting sacred buildings, by the one word temple. Two Russian translations of the Quran from the same French original reveal different strategies of rendering the lexeme temple. In the second (unpublished) translation, the lexeme temple is almost always translated as a khram. In the first translation, published in St. Petersburg in 1716, the translator demonstrates a greater variety in the ways of translating the word temple, using the lexemes kostiol (kościół), mechet’ (mosque) and tserkov’ (church). These lexemes in the first translation can occur in the same type of contexts and alternate within the same chapter, which indicates their ability to act as partial synonyms. In this usage, there is a certain similarity between the first translation of the Quran and the second translation of Metamorphoses, also made in the Petrine era from the Polish language, as well as with Petr Tolstoy’s Journey through Europe in 1699. The peculiarities of the translation of the French word temple in the printed Quran of 1716 to a certain extent support the hypothesis of E. Babayeva considering Petr Tolstoy as the translator of this text.

Tatyana Pentkovskaya (Moscow, Russia)

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