Parodic Translation: Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Boris Petrovsky’ Pseudonym

Summary

When Katherine Mansfield first began publishing in Rhythm in the spring of 1912, she contributed a short story set in the backblocks of New Zealand, ‘The Woman at the Store’, together with two poems ‘Translated from the Russian of Boris Petrovsky’. These were fake translations, written by Mansfield herself. ‘Boris Petrovsky’ was the first pseudonym Mansfield used in Rhythm, a nom de plume that she returned to on four other occasions in the magazine. And the mask continues to trick readers. As recently as 2009, in his chapter on Rhythm in the first volume of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker inaccurately observed: ‘translations, probably by Mansfield, of poems by Boris Petrovsky served, once more, to confirm the magazine's internationalism’. The confusion most likely arises out of the fact that Mansfield's poetry, in comparison to her prose, has received very little critical attention; whereas the pseudonymous prose pieces she contributed to Rhythm have all been republished and examined extensively, the ‘Boris Petrovsky’ poems remain relatively obscure in Mansfield's oeuvre.

Mansfield scholars tend to agree with Gerri Kimber that the ‘reason for the Russian-sounding pseudonym is unclear’. Comparatively, the other pseudonyms used by Mansfield in Rhythm can be easily identified, and we can readily account for the reasons for their use. The surname of ‘Lili Heron’ refers to the middle name of Mansfield's brother and the idealised family home of the ‘Heron’ that she later imagined after his death, with the connotations of innocence attached to the lily flower reflecting the content of the two stories in which Mansfield used the pseudonym, ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ and ‘The Little Girl’. Similarly, the nickname ‘The Tiger’, which Mansfield shared with the principal editor of Rhythm, John Middleton Murry, provided her with a ferocious persona that resonated with the magazine's focus on les Fauves (the wild beasts) and evoked the eat-or-be-eaten world of the London literati depicted in ‘Sunday Lunch’.

Why did Mansfield choose the ‘Russian-sounding’ pseudonym of ‘Boris Petrovsky’? What are the possible origins of this imagined name? And why did she decide to frame these poems as fraudulent ‘translations’? In this article, I argue that the Petrovsky poems can be categorised as ‘parodic translations’ which can be situated against very specific publishing and political-historical contexts.