Letter from the Director of the Hermitage
The Translation of Cultures

The Hermitage is an imperial museum and therefore we dedicated the preceding issue to a discussion about empires as an element of culture. The Hermitage is an encyclopedic and universal museum. Its main activity is to engage in the dialogue of cultures and this requires translation. For this reason, translation is the central topic of this issue.
Translating cultures is a complex task. At every step one encounters "false friends of the translator." A cross does not always signify Christianity. Often it is the symbol of the solar divinity. A six-pointed star does not always signify Judaism or Zionism. In many cultures it is a magical sign which protects against misfortune. A half-moon can symbolize the Moon goddess, or the Madonna, or Islam.
Stereotypes influence the translation. The Russian sobriquet "Grozny," as in "Ivan Grozny," is more complex than its standard rendering in English as "the Terrible," which matches Western ideas about Russia. And the conventional translation of the title of Tolstoy's novel Voina i Mir -War and Peace - misses the point that the second word did not mean "peace" but rather "society." However, many Russians themselves have forgotten this.
A "translation" between cultures is always subjective. One can take as the point of departure exaggerated differences. Alternatively, one can begin by searching for similarities. In the latter case "jihad" will not be interpreted as "war on the infidel" but rather as "struggle" (with oneself, with temptation, with enemies), and Islam will not be taken to mean a "fanatical submission to Allah" but "humility before God." There is a difference.
However, museums are dominated by objects, not by words and they speak their own language, which is the complex and beautiful language of culture. We will also try to translate this.

Mikhail Piotrovsky
Director of the State Hermitage

Table of Contents:

A word from the editor-in-chief

Events

'New Holland' will be British

The Mariinsky Theatre's third stage

An icy 'remake' on Palace Square

New-old antiquities halls

Russian auctions

New acquisitions

The difficulties of translation

Harry Schwartz

The Rembrandt of different nations

Carlo Ginsburg

"We" and "They"
Relativistic views of Herodotus on barbarians and barbarianism

Evgenia Gershkovich

Sochi. Autumn of the patriarch
The mass-produced architecture of the time of Caligula and Nero suited the court of the Soviet regime perfectly

Ian Levchenko

Rodeo across the Atlantic

Mr Western in the country of the Bolsheviks

The difficulties of translation: exhibitions

Roman Grigoriev

Kira Dolinina

Rembrandt etchings

Anna Trofimova

The road to Byzantium

Philology corner

Alexander Zholkovsky

You cannot imagine where you will find something and where you will lose it

Gogol and Dostoevsky: lost in translation?

The difficulties of translation: remarks

Portraits

Anna Tolstova

Scheherezade

Photography

Sarah Moon

Petersburg

Iconography

Arkady Ippolitov

Barbarians

Barbarianism and civilization could not exist without one another. How do you find barbarians in the Hermitage?

The Collection

Maria Haltunen

A journey from Petersburg to Moscow

No resource was spared to ensure that the new Soviet capital got a worthy museum, including art exhibits of the Hermitage

Natalya Semenova

The museum of the avant-garde

The legendary museum of modern Western art today looks poor: the majority of masterpieces from the collection of Shchukin and Morozov were kept in storage rooms

Antiquities

Svetlana Pankova

The Siberian tattoo

Mummies dating from the 5th-3rd centuries BC found in Siberia have turned out to be tattooed. The average tattoo-salon of our day can only envy the mastership of these drawings.

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exhibitions

books

festival

concert

Forecast

Announcements of exhibitions of museums in Russia and abroad

My Hermitage

Andrei Dmitriev

Contact Information:
Contact person: Maria Berntseva
Director of Marketing
E-mail: berntseva@sptimes.ru
Telephone: +7 812 325 60 80

Hermitage Magazine, Spring 2006 N 2(6-7)