Modernising the Ukrainian Language through the Power of Translation: Ihor Kostetskyi’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

A translation project of Shakespeare’s sonnets undertaken by a prominent representative of the Ukrainian diaspora in Western Europe, Ihor Kostetskyi, aimed to reconstruct and revitalise the modern Ukrainian language through translation in the 1950s. Kostetskyi saw the creative laboratory of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a tool of transformative influence on the state of the Ukrainian literary language, which in the Soviet Union suffered from censorship and countless bans aimed at depriving and Russifying its lexical, grammatical and stylistic diversity. Most Ukrainian writers in the diaspora after the Second World War sought to reconstruct and develop the Ukrainian language. Kostetskyi’s formalist translation of the complete sonnets into a creatively stylised “Shakespearean” Ukrainian is the object of the present study.