ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the translation of metatextual operators, discourse markers that express the speaker's attitude toward the reported information. It explores the shifting reputation of Charles Dickens in the Russian context, demonstrating how it was both reflected in and formed by translations. The book analyzes the contributions of the versatile emigre poet Slava Mogutin across Russian and American cultural contexts, focusing on his search for Russian expressions of queer culture, again filling a gap in the target literature. It provides the notion of context in a post-Soviet reality of restructured national space and within the new diasporas that have emerged as a consequence. Moving away from the context of the original was an important stage in dismantling the model of translation as mimesis, which inevitably cast translations as pale copies of their originals.
