Translation and Political Address: Adamantios Korais and Alexander Chavchavadze in the Balkan-Caucasian Periphery

Abstract

This article examines translation as an instrument of deliberate political address in two peripheral European regions during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the Greek Balkans under Ottoman administration and the Georgian Cau-casus under Russian imperial rule. It focuses on Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), whose 1802 and 1823 translations of Cesare Beccaria's Dei delitti e delle pene were addressed to strikingly different political constituencies, first to the newly founded Greek Septinsular Republic, later to "the future judges of the Greeks" during the War of Independence. This shift in dedication shows how a single translated text could be redeployed to articulate an evolving national political vocabulary. The article places Korais's case alongside Alexander Chavchavadze (1786–1846), a central figure of Georgian romanticism, whose 1804 translation of a Rousseauian tract on property and tyranny, composed in prison after an anti-Russian uprising and dedicated to a fellow participant in that uprising, offers an unusually direct instance of translation as political testimony in a different imperial context. Treating the Balkan-Caucasian region as a coherent cultural zone, the study argues that translation functioned not as peripheral literary borrowing but as a strategic mechanism through which small nations negotiated cultural modernization and forged national consciousness under conditions of limited sovereignty. The comparison reveals both convergences, translation's association with political philosophy and the formation of a national intelligentsia, and differences of scale and register shaped by distinct political horizons.