Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate as a Transcreation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss whether it is possible to view transcreation as a type of translation in which a fusion of domesticating and foreignizing methods is used in order to translate the original text. It is a translation that sends the reader abroad without his or her awareness of being transported or indeed of being exposed to another language and culture. The Golden Gate, a novel in verse written by Vikram Seth in 1986, is chosen to illustrate this type of translation. Examples will be given of how Seth manages to recreate Eugene Onegin (1830s), a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), in new settings at the end of the twentieth century and in the Western hemisphere. Seth’s transcreation of the novel is not a translation in its early Christian use of the term. The body of the Russian novel is not excavated, transported and buried in The Golden Gate. Instead, it is re-incarnated there and has a new life: this time in California, far from its previous existence in terms of time and place.