Korney Chukovsky in English. Famous Russian writer, translator, literary critic Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky
The telephone rank.
“Hello! Who's there?"
“The Polar Bear.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m calling for the Elephant.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants a little
Peanut brittle.”
“Peanut brittle! … And for whom?”
“It's for his little
Elephant sons.”
“How much does he want?”
“Oh, five or six tons.
Right now that's all
That they can manage—they’re quite small.”
The telephone rank. The Crocodile
Said, with a tear,
“My dearest dear,
We don’t need umbrellas or mackintoshes;
My wife and baby need new galoshes;
Send us some, please!”
“Wait-wasn’t it you
Who just last week ordered two
Pairs of beautiful brand-new galoshes?”
“Oh, those that came last week-they
Got gobbled up right away;
And we just can’t wait-
For supper tonight
We’d like to sprinkle on our goulashes
One or two dozen delicious galoshes!”
The telephone rank. The Turtle Doves
Said: “Send us, please, some long white gloves!”
It rank again; the Chimpanzees
Giggled: “Phone books, please!”
The telephone rank. The Grizzly Bear
Said: “Grr-Grr!”
“Stop, Bear, don’t growl, don’t bawl!
Just tell me what you want!”
But on he went-“Grr!” Grrrrrrr…”
Why; what for?
I couldn't make out;
I just banged down the receiver.
The telephone rank. The Flamingos
Said: “Rush us over a bottle of those
Little pink pills! ...
We've swallowed every frog in the lake,
And are croaking with a stomachache!”
The Pig telephoned. Ivan Pigtail
Said: “Send over Nina Nightingale!
Together, I bet,
We'll sing a duet
That opera lovers will never forget!
I'll begin-"
“No, you won’t. The Divine Nightingale
Accompany a Pig! Ivan Petrovich,
No!
You’d better call on Katya Crow!”
The telephone rank. The Polar Bear
Said: “Come to the aid of the Walrus, Sir!
He's about
to choke
on a fat
oyster!”
And so it goes. The whole day long
The same silly song:
Ting-a-ling!
Ting-a-ling!
Ting-a-ling!
A Seal telephones, and then a Gazelle,
And just now two very queer
Reindeer,
Who said: “Oh, dear, oh, dear,
Did you hear? Is it true
That the Bump-Bump Cars at the Carnival
Have everyone burned up?”
“Are you out of your minds, you silly Deer?
The Merry-Go-Round
At the Carnival still goes round,
And the Bump-Bump Cars are running, too;
You ought to go right
Out to the Carnival this very night
And buzz around in the Bump-Bump Cars
And ride the Ferris Wheel up to the stars!”
But they wouldn’t listen, the silly Deer;
They just went on: “Oh, dear, oh, dear,
Did you hear? Is it true
That the Bump-Bump Cars
At the Carnival
Have everyone burned up?”
How wrong-headed Reindeer really are!
At five in the morning the telephone rank:
The Kangaroo
Said: “Hello, Rub-a-dub-dub,
How are you?”
Which really made me ravaging mad.
“I don’t know any Rub-a-dub-dub,
Soapflakes! Pancakes! Bubbledy-bub
Why don't you
Try calling Pinhead Zero Two! …”
I haven’t slept for three whole nights.
I'd really like to go to bed
And get some sleep.
But every time I lay down my head
The telephone rings.
“Who's there-Hello!”
“It's the Rhino.”
“What's wrong, Rhino?”
“Terrible trouble,
Come on the double!”
“What's the matter? Why the fuss?”
“Quick. Save him..."
“Who?”
“The hippopotamus.
He’s sinking out there in that awful swamp…”
“In the swamp?”
“Yes, he’s stuck.”
“And if you don’t come right away,
He'll drown in that terrible damp
And dismal swamp.
He'll die, he'll croak-oh, oh, oh.
Poor Hippo-po-po………………”
“Okay...
I'm coming
Right away!”
Whew: What a job! You need a truck
To help a Hippo when he’s stuck!
Korney Chukovsky
Translated by William Jay Smith
Funny English songs translated by Chukovsky. These rhymes are easy to remember and children really like them. Read Poems about Barabek, Kotausi and Mausi, Chicken and others on our website.
Brave men
Our tailors
What brave ones:
“We are not afraid of animals,
No wolves, no bears!”
How did you get out the gate?
Yes, we saw a snail -
We got scared
Run away!
Here they are
Brave tailors! 
(Illustration by V.Suteeva)
Crooked Song
There lived a man
twisted legs,
And he walked for a whole century
Along a crooked path.
And beyond the crooked river
In a crooked house
Lived in summer and winter
Crooked mice.
And they stood at the gate
Twisted Christmas trees,
We walked there without worries
Crooked wolves.
And they had one
Crooked cat
And she meowed
Sitting by the window.
And beyond the crooked bridge
Crooked woman
Through the swamp barefoot
Jumped like a toad.
And it was in her hand
twisted stick,
And flew after her
Twisted jackdaw.
(Illustration by V. Suteeva)
Barabek
(How to tease a glutton)
Robin Bobin Barabek
Ate forty people
And a cow and a bull,
And the crooked butcher,
And the cart and the arc,
And a broom and a poker,
I ate the church, I ate the house,
And a forge with a blacksmith,
And then he says:
“My stomach hurts!”
(Illustration by V.Suteeva)
Kotausi and Mausi
Once upon a time there lived a mouse named Mousey
And suddenly I saw Kotausi.
Kotaushi has evil eyes
And the evil, despicable Zubausi.
Kotausi ran up to Mausi
And she waved her tail:
"Oh, Mausi, Mausi, Mausi,
Come to me, dear Mausi,
I'll sing you a song, Mausi,
A wonderful song, Mausi!”
But smart Mausi answered:
“You will not deceive me, Kotaushi!
I see your evil eyes
And the evil, despicable Zubausi!”
This is how smart Mausi answered:
And quickly run away from Kotausi.
(Illustration by V.Suteeva)
Chicken
I had a beautiful hen.
Oh, what a smart chicken she was!
She sewed caftans for me, sewed boots,
She baked sweet, rosy pies for me.
And when he manages, he sits at the gate -
He will tell a fairy tale, sing a song.
(ed. Planet of Childhood)
Jenny
Jenny lost her shoe
I cried and searched for a long time.
The miller found a shoe
And ground it at the mill.
(Published by Planet of Childhood)
Published by: Mishka 04.02.2018 12:00 24.05.2019Confirm rating
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The purpose of this work is to compare the literal translation with the translation
Task Our research is to compare the literal translation with the original and with Chukovsky’s translation, as well as to show the nonsense in Chukovsky’s works. The topic of our research: “Features of the translation of K.I. Chukovsky in English children's poetry".
The object of the study is poems and songs translated by K. Chukovsky.
The subject of the study is the process of translating songs and poems into Russian. The work consists of two chapters, introduction, conclusion and appendix.
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Introduction__________________________________________________________3
1.1 What do Chukovsky and England have in common?_____________________ 4-7 1.2 “Telephone” - classic Russian nonsense ___________________ 7-12
2.1 How to make “nonsense” “sense”?______________________ 13-16
2.2 How to make “meaning” “nonsense”?______________________ 16-19
Conclusion__________________________________________________________20-21
Bibliography_______________________________________________22
Introduction
There are names that live in our minds as if from the beginning: exactly as long as we remember. The name of Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky is one of them. Our acquaintance with him begins in the happy infancy years, when we first become acquainted with his children's songs, rhymes - teasers, in which we ourselves experience the events, sympathize and rejoice along with his heroes. Beautifully translated English folklore will not leave even the most serious adult indifferent. Our childhood begins with the punning “Telephone”, the insatiable “Barabek” and continues with even more entertaining works that Korney Chukovsky translated for us. He retold for children “Robinson Crusoe” by D. Defoe, “Baron Munchausen” by E. Raspe, many biblical stories and Greek myths. His passion was England and the English language, which he learned on his own, and became interested in children's folklore. It is difficult to list all of Chukovsky’s achievements. The greatest reward for the writer was his insane popularity.
The purpose of this work is to compare the literal translation with the translationthe outstanding Russian poet and children's writer K.I. Chukovsky.
Task Our research is to compare the literal translation with the original and with Chukovsky’s translation, as well as to show the nonsense in Chukovsky’s works. The topic of our research: “Features of the translation of K.I. Chukovsky in English children's poetry".
The object of the study is poems and songs translated by K. Chukovsky.
The subject of the study is the process of translating songs and poems into Russian. The work consists of two chapters, introduction, conclusion and appendix.
Chapter I English children's poetry in translations by K.I. Chukovsky
- What do Chukovsky and England have in common?
Chukovsky is an outstanding Russian poet, publicist, translator, children's writer, and linguist.
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky (real name - Nikolai Vasilyevich Korneychukov) was born on March 31 (according to the official style, 19) March 1882. In St. Petersburg. From his youth, Chukovsky led a working life, read a lot, and independently studied English and French. In 1901 he began publishing in the newspaper Odessa News. In 1903, the newspaper sent a young employee as a correspondent to London. He meets Arthur Conan Doyle, Herbert Wells and other English writers. In 1916 At the invitation of Gorky, Chukovsky heads the children's department of the Parus publishing house. Then he himself began to write children's poems, and then prose.
As “adult” fans of Chukovsky know, England and English culture were the passion and love of his life. This affected not only the fact that he became one of the most authoritative and professional translators from English and created his own translation school, but also the fact that English literature largely influenced his work. The poems and songs of Korney Chukovsky are often not so much translations as works written based on English folklore. All his work is “saturated” with English children's folklore. In his most famous fairy tales, here and there in various manifestations one can feel the poet’s “fall in love” with English literature. Chukovsky’s works contain images that migrated from the song “Hey diddle diddle” and were reinterpreted by him. Cups and spoons wandering around the world are easily recognizable in “Fedora’s Mountain”, “Moidodyr”, as well as in the poem “Sandwich”. The basis of English children's poetry is the so-called nonsense (in Russian - absurdity, nonsense, nonsense). Many Russian readers (and listeners) who grew up reading Chukovsky’s fairy tales often have no idea how closely these fairy tales are related to the rhymes that English-speaking children listen to and read. It seems that there can be purely English in the fairy tales “Fedorino’s Mountain” or “Telephone”? However, for those who are well acquainted with both English children's poetry and Chukovsky's fairy tales, this connection is visible quite clearly.
Each of Chukovsky's fairy tales has a closed, complete plot. But all together they form a kind of fairy-tale world. Observing children, Chukovsky noticed that the child does not perceive things in themselves; they exist for him insofar as they move. A stationary object in the child’s mind is inseparable from a stationary background, as if merging with it. Therefore, in Chukovsky’s fairy tales, the most static, inert, heavy, the most difficult to lift things (literally and figuratively) move rapidly in all directions, flutter with the ease of a moth, fly with the speed of an arrow, hum like a storm, so that it flashes and dazzles in the eyes , just make sure to keep an eye on it. This is captivating and really makes you follow the stormy whirlwinds that in the first line pick up and drive things, for example, in “Fedora’s Mountain.” The reader gets into the fairy tale “The Cockroach” as if he were jumping into a speeding tram. In most fairy tales, the beginning of the action coincides with the first line. In other cases, at the beginning a number of quickly moving objects are listed, creating something like acceleration, and the beginning occurs as if by inertia. Enumerative intonation is characteristic of the beginning of Chukovsky's fairy tales, but objects are always listed either set in motion by the plot, or rapidly moving towards it. The movement does not stop for a minute. Acute situations, bizarre episodes, funny details follow each other at a rapid pace.
Chukovsky conducted observations on the peculiarities of children’s perception of words - prosaic and poetic words. He recorded the rhythmic muttering of the kids, which sometimes resulted - sometimes to the surprise of the creator himself - into a meaningful verse, and sometimes remains a cheerful muttering. Chukovsky studied his notes, compared them with the properties and possibilities of Russian verse, with the works of adult poets and folk art. He counted the verbs in children's speech and watched how the kids danced their poems, he checked how the children heard rhyme, and found that they did not use epithets.
K. Chukovsky also knew how to read them between the lines and see in them a reflection of historical events or legends. The objects of such “decodings” were the children's fairy tales of Korney Chukovsky, and first of all the fairy tale “The Cockroach”. Chukovsky noted that the British tend to look for connections with specific historical events, even those nursery rhymes that have deep mythological roots. For example, the history of the origin of the saying about the ladybug is often associated with the Great Fire of London of 1666. Another example of a connection with historical events is nursery rhymes, associated with typical characters, and perhaps the most popular of them is HUMPTY DUMPTY. He is well known to Russian children under the name Shaltaya - Dumpty. It is familiar to Russian readers from the translation by S.Ya. Marshak. In Russia, he is also known for L. Carroll’s fairy tale “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” and in England, Humpty Dumpty owes this fairy tale his particular popularity and idea of his appearance. Illustrator John Tenniel depicted it in the form of an egg.
- “Telephone” is classic Russian nonsense.
Chukovsky's fairy tales have been translated into English and are in demand in English-speaking countries: I wonder if their readers recognize something “native” for themselves in these fairy tales? Or maybe this connection is visible only to professionals who don’t know why they needed to research whether English literature influenced the creation of our favorite fairy tales or not...
English-speaking translators and English-speaking readers are clearly aware of Chukovsky’s connection with English culture and know that he was a translator and popularizer of English literature. They perceive his fairy tales as nonsense. Through their eyes, English children's songs that Chukovsky translated, for example, “Barabek”, “The Crooked Song” and “Kotausi and Mausi”, and his own fairy tales are about the same thing - vivid examples of the nonsense genre that is so loved by English-speaking readers for its absurdity, for the world “upside down”. The most popular fairy tale by translators and readers, “Telephone,” is presented by publishers as “classic Russian nonsense.”It turns out that “Telephone” is a prime example of English nonsense. Why do the British feel this so keenly and why do we, Russian readers, not realize that “Telephone” is “nonsense”, “nonsense”?
Chukovsky understood nonsense in his own way and modified it in fairy tales, and the translators, in turn, largelyignored these modifications and emphasized signs of nonsense or found them where they actually did not exist.
The taste for nonsense was instilled in Chukovsky at the dawn of his youth by the author of a self-instruction manual on the English language, where absurd sentences were offered for translation: “Does this blind stranger see the blue tree of the deaf-mute singer, on which a blue cow sits, smiling? »
Later Chukovsky became acquainted with English children's folklore. One of the children's songs that particularly fascinated him was the famous song about the cow jumping over the moon:
The moon that the cow jumps over is clearly related to “The Stolen Sun” and to the moon that was nailed to the sky at the end of “Cockroach,” while the cup and spoon refer to “Fedora’s Grief.” And these are far from the only examples of such borrowings.
Chukovsky was also well aware of literary examples of English nonsense.
Chukovsky deliberately promoted nonsense and spoke about the pedagogical value of changelings (as he generally called these genres). In the book “From Two to Five” the chapter “Absurd absurdities” is devoted to this, where the author, in particular, refers to English absurd songs and sayings, for example:
Simon, Simon, simplicity
Catches a whale with a fishing rod!
He, of course, does not forget about Russian nonsense:
A village was driving past a man...
However, no matter how fascinated Chukovsky is with the poetry of nonsense, he understands itquite peculiar. Chukovsky thinks of the world created by the works of these genres as inverted, but inverted in a systematic and orderly manner. Simply put, he understood nonsense “in Russian”. He is confident that “in all these confusions, in essence, an ideal order is observed. There is a system to this “madness.”
In the book “From Two to Five,” he admits that for a long time he could not understand why children “gravitate” so much to such genres. Finally, he decided that “... any deviation from the norm strengthens the child in the norm., and he values his strong orientation in the world even more highly. “I won’t burn myself with cold porridge”; “I’m not afraid of a snail”; “I won’t look for strawberries at the bottom of the sea.”
Chukovsky simplifies the problem: by endowing nonsense with only “pedagogical value,” he denies the child, and even himself, the aesthetic feeling evoked by nonsense. After all, the child directly enjoys various “nonsense” and he himself, only in the name of his own delight, creates this “nonsense”: shawls, puts everything on backwards, misinterprets the names of relatives, deliberately incorrectly recites poems that are well known to him... The role of nonsense, according to Chukovsky, is to help understand the organization of the world around us. Nonsense must necessarily “add up” into an orderly and harmonious world.
This is all the more easy since the author of the most popular translation of “Telephone,” Jamie Gambrell, did everything to emphasize the features of nonsense, finding nonsense even where there is none in the original.
For example.
Text by Chukovsky | Literal translation | Gambrell |
And then the pig called: |
"What? – I yelled. – | Then a pig phoned to fret. “What?” I roared |
Apparently, balancing between the fascination with nonsense and the desire to comprehend it, Chukovsky created a paradoxical, “double-sided” fairy tale, turning to Russian readers with the realm of meaning, and to English readers with the realm of nonsense, which lies dormant in Chukovsky’s work “on demand”, that is, in essence , Chukovsky created a work that is as much Russian as it is English.
That is why it is easy for English-speaking readers to see in the fairy tale “Telephone,” translated into English, a reverse translation, that is, in essence, their own native culture that visited Russia, and perceive this fairy tale as an example of their native genre of nonsense.
The next funny poem is a teaser for a glutton. He has two translations: S.Ya. Marshak and K.I. Chukovsky. Translation by K.I. Chukovsky will be heard in a song to the music of the Soviet composer G. Gladkov. Let's listen and compare them.
Robin the Bobbin, the big bellied Ben, | Robin Bobin somehow S. Marshak. Robin Bobin Barabek K. Chukovsky. |
And Chukovsky could not have it any other way. He, as a teacher by vocation, always strived teach the norm . Including the language norm. Hence his famous book “Alive as Life” about the norms of the Russian language, completely uncharacteristic for a person fascinated by nonsense.
Chapter II Features of translation
2.1 How to make “nonsense” “sense”?
Signs of such an understanding of nonsense are visible in Chukovsky’s works themselves. For example, in the world of Chukovsky’s “nonsense” there is often someone who is trying to put everything in its place and says: “Whoever is told to tweet - Don’t purr!”
A step into the world of nonsense presupposes a return step into a renewed and ordered world.:
...The sea began to go out -
And it went out.
The animals were happy!
They laughed and sang.
Ears flapped
They stamped their feet.
The geese have started again
Scream like a goose... (1, 92)
The tendency to “collapse” nonsense is very clearly visible in Chukovsky’s translations of English absurd songs. Chukovsky always strives to somehow explain why something turned out to be mixed up. For example, in the translation of a song about tailors:
Literal translation | Chukovsky (Brave Men) | Original |
Four and twenty tailors went to kill the snail; | Our tailors | Four and twenty tailors went to kill a snail; |
The absurd plot, nonsense in Chukovsky’s translation is “collapsed” and comprehended, turning from absurdity into exaggeration. In Chukovsky's song, the absurdity of the plot disappears, since the poem is read as a tease, built on irony and hyperbole, according to the scheme: tailors are so brave (meaning cowardly) that even snails are afraid. Almost the same thing happens with the song about Robin Bobbin. In the English version, the half-absurd, half-mythical "Robin Bobbin, Big Belly Ben" eats people, animals and buildings, and possibly all the elves, and at the end complains that his belly is not yet full. English-speaking Internet users call this hero “a cannibal glutton with a big belly.” Chukovsky calls his poem the aesthetically frivolous word “Barabek”, gives the subtitle “How to tease a glutton” and ends with the lines: “And then he says: “My stomach hurts.” And “a cannibal glutton with a big belly” turns into a “frivolous” hyperbole.
Some of Chukovsky’s untranslated lines are constructed using the same scheme:
Glad, glad, glad
Light birch trees,
And on them with joy
Roses are growing.
Glad, glad, glad
Dark aspens,
And on them with joy
Oranges are growing. (1, 157)
These stanzas, of course, are somewhat reminiscent of the clumsy “I sowed hemp, and crayfish grew, crows bloomed...”, or “I climb a pear tree, shake pears, crucian carp fall, collect sour cream,” but in fact they differ radically from them: Chukovsky succeeded in based on nonsense to create a children's lyrical ode to joy, built on hyperbole.
Chukovsky’s understanding of nonsense is reminiscent of an argument between two world-famous philologists about the meaninglessness of the phrase “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
Noam Chomsky coined this phrase to give an example of a grammatically correct but meaningless sentence.
Roman Yakobson responded to this by saying that this phrase is not at all meaningless. He talked about how, for example, “colorless green” is almost the same as “pale green,” only with a humorous twist. And the word “green” in the word “ideas” is something reminiscent of the Russian expression “green melancholy”
Chukovsky deals with English nonsense in the same way as Roman Yakobson did with a meaningless sentence, that is, he literally interprets it.
Thus, Chukovsky, being fascinated by the poetry of nonsense, at the same time saw it very specifically; in fact, he deprived nonsense of its core - the charm of meaninglessness. Naturally, in this case it is difficult to talk about adequate perception and adequate translations of English “meaningless” songs.
2.2 How to make “meaning” “nonsense”?
But something else is also interesting. And English readers cannot adequately perceive Chukovsky’s texts for the same reasons.
And it is no coincidence that the fairy tale “Telephone” became the most popular among English readers.
The fact is that it is in this text that one does NOT feel any comprehension of nonsense. Apparently, the nonsense in “Telephone” remained in its untouched, “unthought” form.
Jamie Gambrell's translation is very poetic and, like Chukovsky's texts, rhythmic and witty, but some details show how the translation text submits to the genre of nonsense, or more precisely, to the translator's understanding of the genre.
For example.
Text by Chukovsky | Literal translation | Gambrell |
And then the pig called: | Then the pig called to torture. "What? – I yelled. – | Then a pig phoned to fret. “What?” I roared |
For some reason, into the logical, although offensive to the pigs, proposal of Chukovsky’s hero to “call the crow,” an extra line with the absurd statement that pigs dance a jig is inserted, not dictated by the need to solve technical translation problems, but designed to give the dialogue a touch of madness. Why is it more appropriate for a pig to dance a jig rather than sing a duet? - only the hero Gambrell knows about this. It is interesting that Chukovsky’s hero is trying with all his might to resist the world of disorder and bustle; it is disorder and chaos that irritate him. Gambrell, with the phrase about pigs and jigs, includes the hero into this world.
The translator also betrays the word “nonsense”, which is inserted into the translation text.
Of course, the word “nonsense” is the best way to translate the word “rubbish”. However, in the original the words “such rubbish” do not at all mean “it was nonsense”, “it was nonsense”. “And such rubbish - all day long” - is more like a sentence: “And like this all day long” - this is rather a complaint about commotion, bustle and anxiety. Moreover, the translator understands this very well and compensates for this meaning by adding the line “What a tremendous concern!” However, despite understanding, he is unable to refuse the word “nonsense”, which, in his opinion, could not be more appropriate in this text.
And finally, reading the fairy tale as nonsense and a dialogue between madmen prepares a slightly different ending.
The nonsense genre helps to open one's eyes to the absurdity of the ending: the episode with the hippopotamus being pulled out of the swamp is thought of as absurd. In Chukovsky, the episode seems natural: “the hippopotamus fell into the swamp,” but the translator sees the absurdity in this phrase and emphasizes it. The literal meaning of the translation: “a hippopotamus cannot fall into a swamp, because it lives in a swamp.” This absurdity is emphasized by a pun characteristic of the nonsense genre and uncharacteristic of Chukovsky. “Bottomless” means both “incomprehensible” and “bottomless.” It remains unclear whether it is incomprehensible that the hippopotamus fell into the swamp, or whether the swamp was bottomless.
Conclusion
The work of Korney Chukovsky is known not only in Russia, but also by children of other countries, and in particular by young English readers who became acquainted with Chukovsky’s works through his translations, which retain the same rhythm, cheerful pun and childish spontaneity. Chukovsky is a writer who turned his passionate interest in children to a close study of their first thoughts, words and emotional movements. Chukovsky was able to soberly and deeply analyze his observations, without losing even the smallest share of his literary temperament. In the games with words and sounds that Chukovsky plays with children, he uses the method of folk comic poems and at the same time the experience of sound organization of verse. Anyone who undertakes to write poetry for children must subtly understand the peculiarities of children’s perception of the literary word, their ways of mastering the real world; he must have perfect command of the technique of verse. The rhythmic clarity of every tale, every stanza translated and written by Chukovsky is excellent, but rarely is the rhythm of the song. Euphony, an abundance of vowels, which Chukovsky is very concerned about, rightly believing that the pressure of consonants makes poetry unsuitable for children.
In the process of preparing a work on the topic: “Features of the translation of K.I. Chukovsky in English children's poetry", I studied such works as "Telephone", "Robin-Bobin", "Brave Men", "Confusion".
After studying this topic, we came to the following conclusions:
- Chukovsky's translations gained their popularity thanks to the high linguistic flair of the author, who was able to convey to the reader the beauty of the language, expressed through rhythm and positive emotional coloring.
- We got acquainted with the original English poetry and its literary translation by Chukovsky and realized how different the perception of the world is in English poems and Russian nursery rhymes. How subtly Chukovsky reveals nonsense in children's songs and tries to make this nonsense understandable to the Russian reader. Chukovsky makes it clear to us that nonsense has great meaning.
- Based on this work, we realized that anyone can make a literal translation, but for literary translation you need to have talent, diligence and love for language.
Bibliography
- Goncharenko S.F. Poetic translation and translation of poetry: constants and variability [Electronic resource]. – Electronic text data.-Access mode: http//orus.slavica.org/node/1734
- More about this: Jacobson R. Boas's views on grammatical meaning / R. Jacobson Selected Works. M., 1985, p.237
- See about this, for example: Lipovetsky M. Fairy tale power: Stalin’s cockroach. New Literary Review No. 5, 2000
- Chukovsky K. Collection. Op.: In 15t. T.2.M., 2001.p.506
- Yasnov M. From Robin-Bobin to little Roussel [Electronic resource]. – Electronic text data.-Access mode http/ magazines.russ.ru/druzhba/2004/12/ias12.html
- James Gabrell Telephone. After “Telephone” by Kornei Chukovsky, North-South Books, 1996, p 17
- Ibid., p 20, 24
- Opie P., Opie I. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Oxford University Press, 1997, p.240, 479
- The Telephone, by Chukovsky. Reviews//http:www.alibris.com/booksearch.detail?invid=8737410559&wquery=chukovsky&qwork=6596089&qsort=p&page=1
The translator differs from the creator only in name.
Vasily Trediakovsky
The fact of the matter is that from a literary translation we demand that it reproduce before us not only the images and thoughts of the translated author, not only his plot schemes, but also his literary manner, his creative personality, his style. If this task is not completed, the translation is no good. This is slander against the writer, which is all the more disgusting because the author almost never has the opportunity to refute it.
This slander is very diverse. Most often, it consists in the fact that instead of the author’s true personality, another appears before the reader, not only unlike her, but clearly hostile to her.
When Simon Chikovani, the famous Georgian poet, saw his poem translated into Russian, he turned to the translators with a request: “I ask that they not translate me at all.”
That is: I don’t want to appear before Russian readers in the fantastic form that my translators give me. If they are unable to reproduce my true creative personality in translation, then let them leave my works alone.
For the grief is not that a bad translator will distort this or that line of Chikovani, but that he will distort Chikovani himself, giving him a different face.
“I,” says the poet, “spoke against exoticism, against the saccharification of Georgian literature, against kebabs and daggers.” And the translation “turned out to be kebabs, wines, wineskins, which I didn’t have and couldn’t have, because, firstly, the material didn’t require it, and secondly, kebabs and wineskins are not my thing” 1 .
It turns out that instead of the real Chikovani, we were shown someone else who not only does not look like him, but is deeply hated by him - the dagger figure of a Caucasian who only wants to dance the lezginka on the stage. Meanwhile, it was precisely this barbecue interpretation of the Caucasus that Chikovani fought in his poems.
So in this case the translator acted as an enemy of the translated author and forced him to embody in his work tendencies, ideas and images that he hated.
This is the main danger of bad translations: they distort not only individual words or phrases, but also the very essence of the translated author. This happens much more often than people think. The translator, so to speak, puts a homemade mask on the author and passes off this mask as his living face.
As far as style is concerned, every creation of an artist is, in essence, his self-portrait, for, willingly or unwillingly, the artist reflects himself in his style.
Trediakovsky also expressed this:
Walt Whitman said the same thing:
“Understand that there cannot be a single feature in your writings that is not in you. If you are vulgar or angry, it will not hide from them. If you like to have a footman stand behind your chair during dinner, this will also be reflected in your writings. If you are a grouch or an envious person, or don’t believe in an afterlife, or have a lowly view of women, this will be reflected even in your omissions, even in what you don’t write. There is no such trick, no such technique, no such recipe to hide at least one of your flaws from your writings” 2.
The reflection of the writer’s personality in the language of his works is called his individual style, inherent to him alone. That's why I say that by distorting his style, we thereby distort his face. If, through our translation, we impose our own style on him, we will turn his self-portrait into a self-portrait of the translator.
Therefore, it is in vain that reviewers, when criticizing this or that translation, note only dictionary errors in it.
It is much more important to catch malicious deviations from the original, which are organically connected with the personality of the translator and in their mass reflect it, overshadowing the translated author. It is much more important to find that dominant deviation from the original, with the help of which the translator imposes his literary self on the reader.
This is the fatal role of translators: the poets they translate often become their doubles. The ancient translations of Homer are indicative in this regard. In England, the Iliad was translated by such great poets as Chapman, Pope and Cowper, but you read these translations and see that there are as many Homers as there are translators. Chapman's Homer is florid, like Chapman, Pope's is pompous, like Pope's, Cowper's is dry and laconic, like Cowper's.
The same thing happened with the poems of the great English lyricist Percy Bysshe Shelley in the translation by Konstantin Balmont: the personality of the translator was too sharply imprinted on the texts of the translation he produced.
It is not individual errors (very numerous) that are striking in this translation, but rather a whole system of errors, a whole system of gags, which in their totality change Shelley’s very physiognomy beyond recognition.
All of Balmont’s adjectives are united into a kind of harmonious whole, they all have the same haberdashery, romance style, and this causes the author a thousand times more damage than random vocabulary errors.
Shelley writes: lute, Balmont translates: the roar of the enchantress’s lute (619, 186) 3.
Shelley wrote: sleep, he translates: luxurious bliss (623, 194).
Shelley wrote: woman, he translates: woman-picture (500, 213).
Shelley wrote: petals, he translates: lush bouquets (507, 179).
Shelley wrote: sound, he translates: a living combination of consonances (505, 203).
So line by line Balmont changes all of Shelley’s poems, giving them the beauty of cheap romances.
And at the same time he attaches some kind of stereotyped epithet to almost every word.
Shelley has stars, Balmont has bright stars (532, 153).
Shelley has an eye, Balmont has a bright eye (532, 135).
Shelley has sadness, Balmont has agonizing torment (504, 191).
Thanks to such systematic changes to the text, Shelley becomes strangely similar to Balmont.
Balmontizing Shelley's poetry, Balmont gives the British poet his own sweeping gestures. Where Shelley has only one single winter twig, Balmont has the widest landscape:
Among the thickets (!) of firs (!) and birches (!),
All around (!), wherever (!) the eye (!) looks (!),
Cold (!) snow (!) fields (!) were covered (!).
I use exclamation marks in parentheses to mark words that Shelley does not have.
From one branch at Balmont a whole thicket grew; from one word winter, vast snowy (and Russian) plains unfolded.
There is such a generous sweep of gestures on literally every page.
Where Shelley has a sunset ray, Balmont has a whole glow: the sunset burns, sparkles with amber (440, 7).
Shelley, for example, says: “You are so kind,” and Balmont pours out a whole fountain of pleasantries:
You are close to me (!), like the night (!) to the radiance of the day (!),
Like a homeland (!) at the last (!) moment (!) of exile (!).
(627, 3)
Shelley glorifies, for example, the wedding night (“A Bridal Song”) - and this is enough for Balmont to create a whole bunch of well-worn cliches that accompany the image of the wedding night in the lusty philistine brains: “self-forgetfulness”, “fusion of passion”, “headboard” , “luxurious bliss.”
Shelley mentioned the nightingale, and here we read from Balmont:
It’s as if he’s composing hymns (!) to the moon (!).
(101)
For what kind of nightingale is it if it does not praise the moon? As soon as Shelley uttered the word lightning, Balmont had a tercet ready:
...And lightning burning (!) light (!)
Cut a depth in the sky (!)
And her loud laughter, giving birth (!) to a wave (!) in the seas (!).
(532, 183)
Therefore, we are no longer surprised to find in him such beauties as the gentle purple of the day, the sigh of a dream, the sweet hour of happiness, the inexpressible delight of being, the foggy path of life, the secrets of fleeting dreams and similar romance rubbish.
Even in the poem, which Balmont translated more or less accurately, there is such a vulgar insertion:
Oh, why, my friend (!) adorable (!),
Shouldn't we merge with you?
(503, 86)
This is the huge imprint the translator’s personality leaves on the personality of the author he is translating. Not only did Balmont distort Shelley’s poems in his translations, he distorted Shelley’s very physiognomy, he gave his beautiful face features of his own personality.
It turned out to be a new face, half-Shelley, half-Balmont - a certain, I would say, Shelmont.
This often happens with poets: when translating them, translators stick out their ego too much, and the more expressive the personality of the translator himself, the more it obscures the translated author from us. Precisely because Balmont has his own literary personality so sharply expressed, he, with all his excellent talent, is not able to reflect the individuality of another poet in translations. And since his talent is foppish, Shelley also became foul with him.
Even more instructive are the translations of the poems of the American poet Walt Whitman, made by the same Balmont.
Even without knowing these translations, anyone could predict in advance that the creative face of Walt Whitman would be distorted in them in the most treacherous way, since, it seems, there was no other writer in the world more distant from him than Balmont.
After all, Walt Whitman, in his work, struggled all his life with frivolous rhetoric, with pompous “music of words,” with external beauty; Long before the appearance of Balmont, he declared himself the blood enemy of those poetic qualities that form the basis of Balmontism.
It was this blood enemy that Balmont tried to make his brother in the lyre, and we can easily imagine how, after such Balmontization, Walt Whitman’s face became distorted.
Translation turned into a struggle between the translator and the poet being translated, into an incessant polemic with him. It could not be otherwise, because, in essence, Balmont hates the American bard, does not allow him to be what he is, tries in every possible way to “correct” him, imposes on him his Balmontisms, his pretentious Art Nouveau style.
For example, Balmont does not allow Walt Whitman to speak in ordinary language and stubbornly replaces his simple words with archaic, Church Slavonic ones.
Whitman says, for example, breasts. Balmont transfers the womb.
Whitman says flag. Balmont transfers the banner.
Whitman says I raise. Balmont translates lifting 4.
Balmont seems ashamed that Whitman writes so unsightly and rudely. He strives to sweeten his poems with Slavicisms. On page 38 he even starts to get milky. And on the 43rd - daughters.
Read, for example, “Song of the Dawn Banner,” from which the examples I gave are taken. There are dozens of Balmontisms such as “music of kissing words” (138), “countless arable lands” (135), “countless carts” (135), there Whitman, who rejected rhyme, rhymes at Balmont’s whim:
We will spin with the winds,
Have fun with the endless wind.
(133)
Everything here, yes, everything I want,
I, a battle banner, look like a sword.
(137)
What Balmont especially hates is the realistic, business-like concreteness that Whitman strives for. And this is understandable, since Balmont generally cultivated vague, hazy images.
The original says definitely and precisely: my Mississippi, my fields in Illinois, my fields in Missouri. Smoothing out this geographical distinctness of words, deliberately veiling it, Balmont translates as follows:
And rivers, and fields, and valleys.
(136)
With such subtle techniques, the translator subordinates the translated author to his favorite style.
In a word, if Walt Whitman knew Russian and could get acquainted with Balmont’s translation, he would certainly address the translator with the request: “I ask that they not translate me at all,” since he would understand that his poems were in his hands an antipodean, who, with the help of a whole system of gags, distorted his face in his own way.
Here I am not talking about random mistakes and blunders, of which Balmont has many.
Whitman admires lilacs, the image of which plays a significant role in his poetry. In English, lilac is lilac, but the translator mistook lilac for a lily and created a species unknown in botany: a lily growing as a wild bush.
Of course, occasional errors are hardly excusable, but still they do not determine the quality of a particular translation.
Here, I repeat, what is important is the system of deviations from the original text: not one error or two, but a whole group of errors that produce in the reader’s mind the same devastating effect: a distortion of the creative personality of the translated author. Random errors are mere nonsense compared to these subtle violations of the author's will, the author's style, which reflect the creative personality of the translator.
No matter how insignificant in itself each such violation of the author’s will may be, in their entirety they represent a colossal harmful force that can turn any original master into a wretched scribbler and generally distort his personality beyond recognition.
These bacilli act imperceptibly, but violently: in one line they will extinguish some burning epithet, in another they will destroy the living pulsation of the rhythm, in the third they will etch out some warm paint - and now there is nothing left of the original: all of it, from beginning to end, became different, as if it had been created by another person who had nothing in common with the author.
Meanwhile, the so-called ordinary people are extremely fond of such reviews, where only individual mistakes made by this or that translator are exposed. They are sure that these mistakes - more or less accidental - measure the entire value of the translation, whereas in fact (I repeat again and again!) the grief is not in individual errors, but in a whole complex of gags, which in their totality change the style of the original.
The translations of the greatest Russian translator, Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky, in most cases reproduce the original with amazing accuracy. His language is so strong and rich that it seems that there are no difficulties that he cannot cope with. Pushkin called Zhukovsky “the genius of translation.” “...In struggles with difficulty he is an extraordinary strongman!” - he said about Zhukovsky in a letter 5.
And yet, the system of deviations from the original that he allows also leads to the fact that the face of the translated author is sometimes replaced by the face of the translator.
When, for example, Zhukovsky, in his translation of Schiller’s tragedy “The Maid of Orleans,” made a “sorceress” out of the “devil,” and a “cunning renegade” out of the “devil wench,” this, of course, could seem like an accident. But, studying all his translations from page to page, we are convinced that this is his main tendency.
All the poems translated by him became, as it were, Zhukovsky’s own poems, because they reflected his quiet, pompous, magnificent, sentimental-melancholic Puritan personality.
His characteristic puritanism was reflected in his translations with extraordinary clarity. From “The Maid of Orleans” he even expels such an expression as “love for a man,” and instead of: “Do not deceive your heart with love for a man,” he writes with decorous vagueness:
Fear hopes, do not know earthly love.
The same puritanism does not allow him to give an accurate translation of that stanza of “The Triumph of the Victors”, where it is said that the hero Menelaus, “rejoicing at his newly conquered wife, wraps his hand in the highest bliss around the charm of her beautiful body.”
Avoiding reproducing such sinful gestures, Zhukovsky makes Menelaus stand decorously near Helen without any manifestations of marital passion:
And standing near Elena
Menelaus then said...
Tyutchev translates this stanza much more accurately:
And my wife, taken from battle,
Happy Atrid again,
Having wrapped his arm around his magnificent figure,
Your passionate gaze makes you happy!.. 6
Of course, all this is not said at all as a reproach to Zhukovsky, who, in his skill and in his inspiration, is one of the greatest translators the history of world literature has ever known. But precisely because his best translations are so accurate, those by no means random deviations from the original, which constitute the dominant feature of his literary style, are especially noticeable in them.
It seems to me that it is indicative of Zhukovsky’s translations that this small circumstance in itself is that in his magnificent version of the burgher’s “Lenora,” where the muscularity of his verse sometimes reaches Pushkin’s strength, he did not even allow himself to hint that lovers galloping in the night on a horse are attracted to yourself a “nuptial bed”, “nuptial bed”. Wherever Burger mentions a bed (Brautbett, Hochzeitbett), Zhukovsky chastely writes: lodging, corner, shelter...
The Soviet translator V. Levik, in his brilliant translation of “Lenora,” reproduced this reality of the original:
Hey, evil spirits! Hey! Follow me here!
Behind me and my wife
To great fun
Above the wedding bed.
Accept us, bridal bed! 7
Needless to say, those lines where Burger irreverently calls the priest a priest and compares the singing of the church clergy with “the croaking of frogs in a pond”, Zhukovsky completely excluded from his translation 8 .
As you know, all kinds of tombs and coffins occupy a large place in Zhukovsky’s symbolism. Therefore, it is by no means accidental that in some of his translations he implants these grave images more often than they are found in the original. Ludwig Uhland, for example, simply says chapel, but Zhukovsky’s translation reads:
Enters: in the chapel, he sees a tomb (!) standing;
Tremblingly, dimly, the lamp (!) burns above her.
("Knight Rollon")
In the corresponding lines of the original there is not a word about the tomb.
Zhukovsky also feels a great passion for lamps. Having read from Ludwig Uhland about the death of the young singer, he, again deviating from the original, compares his death to an extinguished lamp:
Like a sudden breath
The breeze extinguishes the lamp
So faded away in an instant
A young singer from the word.
The lamp was all the more dear to him because by this time it had already become a church word.
Zhukovsky’s craving for Christian symbolism was evident even in Byronov’s translation of “The Prisoner of Chillon,” where he twice calls the hero’s younger brother our angel, a humble angel, although in the original there is no talk of any celestial beings.
Even in Homer’s “Odyssey,” Zhukovsky, as its translator, caught the melancholy characteristic of him, which he spoke about in the preface to his translation 9 . Criticism, admiring the unsurpassed merits of this translation, still could not help but note its extreme subjectivity: Homer in this Russian version of the poem became surprisingly similar to Zhukovsky in many of his features. “Zhukovsky,” according to one learned critic, “introduced into the Odyssey a lot of morality, sentimentality, and some almost Christian concepts that were not at all familiar to the author of the pagan poem.” “In some places in the translated poem, the character of romantic reflection is noticeable, completely alien to the Odyssey 10.
Robert Southey in his famous ballad says about the monks that “they went overseas to the country of the Moors,” and Zhukovsky translates this phrase:
And they humbly carried it to Africa
Heavenly gift of the teachings of Christ.
("Queen of Uraka")
I repeat: these systematic, not at all random, deviations from the text in Zhukovsky are especially noticeable precisely because in all other respects his translations, with very few exceptions, perfectly convey the slightest tonality of the original. And at the same time, it should be noted that the vast majority of changes were made by Zhukovsky in the spirit of the translated author: even if Ludwig Uland does not have a tomb in these lines, let’s say, it could easily be there - in full accordance with his worldview and style.
Sometimes the falsification of the original is carried out under the influence of the political and party preferences of one or another translator. In extreme cases, it comes to deliberate distortion of texts.
In 1934, in Paris, the Comédie Française staged Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus in a new translation by the French nationalist René-Louis Piachot. The translator, with the help of numerous deviations from the English text, gave Coriolanus the features of an ideal reactionary dictator, tragically dying in an unequal struggle with democracy.
Thanks to this translation, the old English play became the battle banner of French reaction.
Those dreams of firm dictatorial power and the crushing of the revolutionary plebs, which are cherished by the French rentier, intimidated by the “Red Peril,” found their full expression in this modernized translation of Shakespeare.
The audience deciphered the play as a pamphlet about the modern political situation in France, and after the first performance in the theater, two violently warring camps formed.
While Coriolanus's curses against the mob evoked warm applause from the stalls, the gallery whistled furiously for him.
I learned about this from an article by L. Borovoy, published at the same time in Literaturnaya Gazeta 11. Borovoy quite rightly blames everything on the translator, who distorted Shakespeare’s play for a specific political purpose. The distortion was made deliberately, which was not hidden by the translator, who entitled his version as follows: “The Tragedy of Coriolanus, freely translated from Shakespeare’s English text and adapted to the conditions of the French stage.”
But let’s imagine that the same translator would decide to convey the same play word for word, without any deviations from the original. And in this case, it may sometimes turn out that his ideological position, in addition to his consciousness and will, will be reflected in his translation.
And for this it is not at all necessary that he set himself the indispensable goal of falsifying the original.
The Russian translator of the same “Coriolanus” A.V. Druzhinin was conscientious and strove for maximum accuracy in his translation.
In no case would he deliberately mutilate Shakespeare's text by adapting it to his political views.
And yet his “Coriolanus” is not far from the one that so admires the French enemies of democracy. Because in his translation he, Druzhinin, unconsciously did the same thing that René-Louis Piachot consciously did. For all its accuracy, his translation played the same reactionary role.
He translated Coriolanus in 1858. That was the time of the struggle between the liberal nobles and the revolutionary commoners, the “nihilists” of the sixties. Therefore, the feuds of Coriolanus with the rebellious mob were understood by the readers of that time in relation to Russian events, and all the curses that Coriolanus uttered against the Roman plebs were felt as an indictment of the Russian young democracy.
With the help of Shakespeare's tragedy, Druzhinin settled party scores with Chernyshevsky and his supporters, and Turgenev and Vasily Botkin welcomed this translation as a political performance.
“Your wonderful idea is to translate Coriolanus,” Turgenev wrote to Druzhinin in October 1856. “You will like him - oh, dearest of conservatives!” 12
Vasily Botkin, who was then moving into the fold of reaction, spoke even more frankly:
“Thank you for choosing Coriolanus: there is the highest modernity in this play” 13.
Thus, what happened with the translation of Coriolanus in the winter of 1934 in the French theater was, in essence, a repetition of what happened in Russia in the late fifties with the Russian translation of the same play.
Both here and there, these translations of Coriolanus were propaganda of the reactionary ideas professed by its translators, and both translators tried to impose an anti-democratic meaning on the play, regardless of whether they sought to reproduce the original as accurately as possible or deliberately distorted it.
Here it would be useful to return to Zhukovsky: with the help of other people's melodies, plots and images, he, as we saw, projected his own self into literature, beyond the narrow limits of which even Byron could not take the poet.
It seemed that the translation of the Odyssey, undertaken by him in his old age, was completely far from any political storms and tornadoes. In the preface to his translation, Zhukovsky indicates from the very beginning that “The Odyssey” for him is a quiet haven where he found the longed-for peace: “I wanted to amuse the soul with primitive poetry, which is so bright and quiet, so life-giving and calming.”
And yet, when Zhukovsky’s translation appeared in print, readers of that time saw in it not a rejection of modernity, but a struggle with modernity. They assessed this seemingly academic work as a kind of hostile act against the Russian reality of that time, which Zhukovsky hated.
The Russian reality of that time seemed terrible to Zhukovsky - and his entire circle. It was the very height of the plebeian forties, when for the first time the foundations of his beloved feudal-patriarchal Russia were so clearly shaken. New, assertive people, petty bourgeois, commoners, have penetrated into science, literature, and all areas of public life.
The voice of Nekrasov had already been heard, Belinsky, whose influence had become enormous by that time, had nurtured the young “natural school”, and all this was felt by Zhukovsky and his co-religionists as a catastrophic collapse of Russian culture. “The age of commercialism, railways and shipping” seemed to Pletnev, Shevyrev, Pogodin “a depressing timelessness.”
In defiance of this hostile era, in contrast to its “realism”, “materialism”, its “mercantilism”, Zhukovsky published his “Odyssey”. Everyone understood the publication of this poem in 1848-1849 - as a current polemic with the new era.
One thousand eight hundred and forty-eight was the year of European revolutions. Reactionary journalists used the Odyssey to shame the “pernicious turmoil” of the West. Senkovsky (Baron Brambeus) wrote this in his “Library for Reading”:
“Leaving the West, covered with black clouds of disaster, Zhukovsky with his bright word, with his captivating Russian verse, Zhukovsky, a poet now more than ever, a poet when everyone has ceased to be poets, Zhukovsky, the last of the poets, takes the hand of himself the first poet, the blind singer, this decrepit but once “divine” Homer, whom everyone there forgot among the deplorable stupidities of time, and, appearing with him before his compatriots, solemnly invites us to a feast of beauty.”
The critic contrasts Zhukovsky’s “Odyssey” with the revolutions taking place in the West, or, as he puts it, “the machinations of the spirit of evil and grief”, “material extravagances”, “anxieties of material false teachings”, “a stream of nonsense” 14.
Here Senkovsky follows in the footsteps of his antagonist Gogol: every time Gogol, already an ardent obscurantist, writes about this new work of Zhukovsky, he persistently contrasts it with the “vague and difficult phenomena” of the modern era. For Gogol, the Odyssey, as translated by Zhukovsky, is a weapon of political struggle. This is what he says in a letter to Pletnev:
“This is sheer grace and a gift to all those in whose souls the sacred fire has not been extinguished and whose hearts are saddened by the turmoil and difficult phenomena of modern times. Nothing could be more comforting for them. We should look at this phenomenon as a sign of God’s mercy towards us, bringing encouragement and refreshment to our souls.”
Glorifying precisely the “clarity,” “balanced calm,” and “quietness” of Homer’s epic translated by Zhukovsky, Gogol declares it the best medicine against the then embitterment and spiritual “turmoil.”
“It is precisely at the present time,” he writes to the militant reactionary poet Yazykov, “when... a painful murmur of dissatisfaction began to be heard everywhere, the voice of human displeasure for everything in the world: for the order of things, for time, for oneself; ...when, through the absurd cries and reckless preaching of new, still darkly heard ideas, one can hear some kind of universal desire to become closer to some desired middle, to find the real law of action, both in the masses and in individual individuals - in a word, this is precisely The time of “Odyssey” will amaze you with the majestic patriarchy of ancient life, the simple simplicity of social springs, the freshness of life, the undulled, infantile clarity of man.”
Gogol most clearly expressed the political tendencies of Zhukovsky’s Odyssey, putting forward in it as especially valuable such features that were the cornerstone of the Nikolaev autocratic system:
“This is strict reverence for customs, this reverent respect for authority and superiors... this is respect and almost reverence for man as a representative of the image of God, this is the belief that not a single good thought arises in his head without the supreme will of our highest being” - that’s what “ It seemed to the then Gogol, Gogol's "Correspondence with Friends", the most attractive in the new translation of Zhukovsky 15.
The translator's social views are sometimes reflected in unexpected ways in the smallest and seemingly random details.
When Druzhinin translated King Lear, he was especially successful in the scenes where Kent, the king’s faithful servant, appears. About this Kent, Druzhinin exclaimed with emotion:
“Never, through thousands of generations yet unborn, will the poetic image of Shakespeare’s Kent, the shining image of a devoted servant, a great loyal subject, die.”
This tenderness could not help but be reflected in his translation. And such an insightful person as Turgenev very clearly formulated the political meaning of the squad’s predilection for Kent.
“I must confess,” Turgenev wrote to Druzhinin, “that if you had not been a conservative, you would never have been able to appreciate Kent, the “great loyal subject,” who shed tears (...) over him” 17.
That is, Kent’s slavish commitment to the monarch, put forward with particular energy in Druzhinin’s translation of “Lear” in his comments on this tragedy, was perceived by Turgenev precisely in terms of social struggle.
It is curious that the first stage production of “King Lear” in Russia, half a century before Druzhinin’s translation, all from beginning to end, had as its sole purpose to strengthen and glorify loyal feelings towards the autocratic kings. The poet N. I. Gnedich eliminated even his madness from his version of “Lear,” whom he called “Lear,” in order to increase the audience’s sympathy for the monarch’s struggle for his “rightful throne.”
And these are the tirades that Shakespeare’s Edmund utters in Gnedich:
“To die for your compatriot is commendable, but for a good sovereign - ah! you have to have another life to feel the sweetness of such death!”
Gnedich’s “Lear,” says one of the newest researchers, “in the context of the events that Russia was experiencing at the time of this tragedy, completely reflected the mood of the minds of the nobility and had an undoubted propaganda value in the interests of this class. The tragedy of an elderly father, persecuted by ungrateful daughters, ultimately reduced by Gnedich to the struggle for the throne, for the “legitimate” rights of the “legitimate” sovereign, at the time of the production of “Leara” was supposed to remind the audience of another “illegal” seizure of the throne (though without voluntary his refusal), which took place in living reality; wasn’t the Duke of Cornvalley personified in the minds of the audience with a living “usurper” who shook the foundations of the peaceful well-being of Europe and involved Russia in the pan-European chaos - with Napoleon Bonaparte, the ungrateful daughters of Lehar - with republican France, which overthrew its king, and Lehar himself - with “ the legitimate" head of the French throne - the future Louis XVIII?
The purpose of "Lear" was to raise the patriotic feeling of Russian citizens, necessary to fight this terrible threat for the restoration of law and order in Europe and - ultimately - for the preservation of the entire feudal-serf system in Russia. Gnedich’s “Lear”... could not help but reflect the patriotic sentiments of the author, who expressed and shared the views of the Russian nobility...
Thus, Shakespeare’s tragedy was turned into a means of propaganda influence in the interests of the ruling class” 18.
Even Hamlet, when it first appeared on the St. Petersburg stage, was imbued with the Russian patriotic spirit. According to P. Viskovatov’s version, King Hamlet exclaims:
Fatherland! I will sacrifice myself for you!
The main purpose of this version of Hamlet was to serve “the purposes of uniting Russian society around the throne and the tsar to fight the approaching Napoleonic hordes” 19.
Of course, the creators of such “Lears” and “Hamlets” did not even strive to become closer to Shakespeare.
But it often happens that the only thing a translator cares about is how to more accurately, truthfully convey in his native language the works of this or that writer, whom he even (in his own way!) loves, but the abyss that lies between their aesthetic and moral views, fatally forces the translator, contrary to his subjective intentions, to deviate far from the original text.
This can be easily seen in those pre-Soviet translations of the poems of the great Armenian poet Avetik Isahakyan, which were performed by Iv. Belousov and E. Nechaev. According to critic Levon Mkrtchyan, most of the deviations they made from the original are explained by the fact that both translators at that time were partially influenced by some populist ideas. “They,” said Levoy Mkrtchyan, “subordinated Isahakyan’s imagery to the imagery of Russian populist lyricism - its supra-sonian branch” 20.
As for those distortions of the original text that later translators introduced into their translations of Isahakyan’s poems, the critic explains these distortions by the fact that the translators “tried to fit Isahakyan to the poetics of Russian symbolism.” In the then translations from Isahakyan, he says, “the images and intonations characteristic of the Symbolists appeared” 21.
And when the People’s Volunteer poet P. F. Yakubovich, known under the pseudonym P. Ya., took on the translation of “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire, he imposed on him a mournful Nekrasov rhythm and a well-worn Nadsonian vocabulary, so that he got a very original Baudelaire - Baudelaire in the Narodnaya Volya style. The author of “Flowers of Evil” would undoubtedly have protested against the removal of those ad libs with which P. Ya. equipped his poems, forcing him to exclaim:
They bring freedom
And Sunday's news
Tired people.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The soul beats helplessly.
It's sad and hurts
And he strives for freedom.
These asides not only distorted Baudelaire's spiritual physiognomy, they sweetened it.
Baudelaire has a poem that begins like this:
One night, lying next to the terrible Jewish woman,
Like a corpse next to a corpse...
P. Ya. reinterpreted this poem in his own way:
With a terrible Jew, beautiful as dead
Sculpted marble, I spent the whole night 22.
He couldn't allow Baudelaire to feel like he and his mistress were corpses. It would have been much more pleasant for him, the translator, if Baudelaire had not had such monstrous feelings - if the woman had seemed to him not a disgusting corpse, but, on the contrary, a most beautiful statue, “sculpted in marble,” almost the Venus de Milo. This way, in his opinion, it will be much more “beautiful.” True, with such a translation there will be nothing left of Baudelaire and it will even turn out to be an anti-Baudelaire, but the translator is not at all embarrassed by this: he is happy to replace the “decadent” Baudelaire with himself, since he places his morality and his aesthetics much higher than Baudelaire’s. Perhaps he is right, but in this case there is no need to take on Baudelaire’s translations, and one can imagine how the author of “The Flowers of Evil” would hate his translator if by some miracle he could get acquainted with his translations.
In one of his youthful letters, Valery Bryusov clearly formulated the main reason for the translator’s failures.
“Yakubovich is a person of a completely different mindset than Baudelaire, and therefore often unintentionally distorts his original. This is the translation of “Like Sisyphus, be rich in patience,” where Mr. Yakubovich preaches something submissive...” in Baudelaire this is one of the most arrogant poems. There are hundreds of examples (literally)” 23.
In a word, it’s a disaster if the translator does not want or cannot renounce the most characteristic features of his personal style, does not want or cannot curb at every step his own tastes, techniques and skills, which are a living reflection of the ideological foundations of his personality.
The French scholar C. Corbet speaks well about this when analyzing Pushkin’s contemporary translation of “Ruslan and Lyudmila” into French: “... the translator dissolved the liveliness and ease of the original in the fog of elegant classical grandiloquence; From the foaming, sparkling wine of Pushkin, only insipid lemonade turned out” 24.
Much more often those translators achieve accuracy who have such sympathy for the authors they translate that they are, as it were, their doubles. They have no one to transform into: the object of their translation is almost adequate to the subject.
Hence, to a large extent, the success of Zhukovsky (translations of Uhland, Gebel, Southey), the success of Vasily Kurochkin, who gave unsurpassed translations of the poems of his relative Beranger. Hence the luck of Valery Bryusov (translations by Verhaeren), the luck of Bunin (translation of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha”), the luck of Tvardovsky (translations of Shevchenko), the luck of Blaginina (translations of L. Kvitko).
Hence Mallarmé's luck (translations by Poe), Fitzgerald's luck (translations by Omar Khayyam), etc., etc., etc.
All this is true. This is an undeniable truth.
But doesn’t the history of literature know such translations that are distinguished by the greatest closeness to the original, although the spiritual appearance of the translator does not coincide in everything (and sometimes does not coincide at all) with the spiritual appearance of the translated author?
There are so many great writers in the world who delight us with their genius, but are infinitely far from both our psyche and our ideas! Are we really going to leave Xenophon, Thucydides, Petrarch, Apuleius, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Ben Jonson without translation just because in many of their features their worldview is alien to us - and even hostile?
Of course not. These translations are completely within our power, but they are incredibly difficult and require from the translator not only talent, not only instinct, but also the renunciation of his own intellectual and mental skills.
One of the most convincing examples of such renunciation: translations of classics of Georgian poetry, performed by such a remarkable artist of words as Nikolai Zabolotsky.
It is unlikely that in the middle of the 20th century he felt like a like-minded person of the medieval poet Rustaveli, who created his immortal “Knight in the Tiger Skin” in the 12th century. And yet, it is impossible to imagine a better translation than Zabolotsky’s: amazingly clear diction, due to an almost magical power over syntax, free breathing of each stanza, for which four obligatory rhymes are not a burden, not a burden, as was often the case with other translators “ Knight”, and strong wings that give the verses of the translation the dynamics of the original:
The essence of love is always beautiful, incomprehensible and true
She is not equal to any fornication:
Fornication is one thing, love is another, a wall separates them,
It is not proper for a person to confuse these names.
And there are at least seven hundred such stanzas, and perhaps more, and all of them are translated masterfully.
In the same way, Zabolotsky did not need to feel like a fellow believer of the inspired Georgian singer David Guramishvili, who lived two hundred and fifty years ago, under Peter I, in order to recreate his pious call with such poetic force:
Listen, people who believe in God,
Those who keep the commandments strictly:
On the day when I appear before you dead,
Remember in peace the lifeless soul 25.
What kind of artistic imagination must one have in order to, having done away with religion long ago, still translate with such perfection the religious thoughts of an ancient author:
You alone save, God,
Lost on the way!
Without you the road is right
No one can get it.
Nikolai Zabolotsky always made the most severe demands on the skill of a translator.
“If,” he wrote, “a translation from a foreign language does not read like a good Russian work, it is either a mediocre or unsuccessful translation” 26.
He brilliantly fulfilled his commandment, making Russian the poems of the same brilliant Georgian David Guramishvili, whose poem “Merry Spring” is captivating with the sophistication of its verse design and the charming elegance of form. The most seemingly rude images, very far from conventional decency, obeying the music of these poems, are perceived as a naive pastoral, as an idyll, imbued with a simple-minded and bright smile:
Feeling attracted to the bride,
The young man began to bend her over so that together
Lie down with them, but the girl,
Not daring to agree
She answered him:
Not until our wedding
Decide to commit sinful acts.
Alas, God forbid us
To desecrate the bed
Before marriage, you and I.
My beloved, as a guarantee of lasting love
Receive me, immaculate, into your home:
Let everyone who sees
It won't hurt in vain
Me with an evil reproach.
The young man in love did not heed the prayer,
He resorted to cunning, inflamed with passion,
Said: - In our estate
They don't think about the wedding
And I can't wait.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the entire poem is translated in such transparent, truly crystal verse - hundreds and hundreds of stanzas, in each a rhymed couplet written in iambic pentameter, replaced by the same three-foot couplet, followed by a three-foot clause, not equipped with a rhyme.
Zabolotsky wonderfully conveyed the stylistic originality of “Merry Spring”, its bright, naive tonality.
With the same classically strict and clear verse, he introduced Vazha Pshavelu, Akaki Tsereteli, and Ilya Chavchavadze to his native literature, creating the monumental “Anthology of Georgian Poetry.” In general, it is difficult to imagine a poet whom he could not translate with the same perfection. The variety of styles did not bother him. Each style was equally close to him.
Such art is accessible only to great translation masters - those who have the precious ability to overcome their ego and artistically transform into the author being translated. This requires not only talent, but also special flexibility, plasticity, and “sociability” of the mind.
Pushkin possessed this sociability of mind to the greatest extent. When Dostoevsky, in his speech about him, glorified his marvelous ability to transform himself into “geniuses of foreign nations,” he meant not only Pushkin’s original works, but also his translations. “The greatest of European poets,” said Dostoevsky, “were never able to embody with such power the genius of a foreign... people, their spirit, all the hidden depth of this spirit” 27.
And Dostoevsky recalls, along with “The Miserly Knight” and “Egyptian Nights,” such poetic translations of Pushkin from English: the fourth scene from John Wilson’s comedy “City of Plague” and the first pages of John Bunyan’s pious treatise “The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to the Next,” translated by Pushkin under the title "Wanderer":
Once wandering among the wild valley,
I was suddenly overcome with great sorrow
And crushed and bent with a heavy burden,
Like someone who is convicted of murder at trial.
I repeat: only mature masters, people of high culture and subtle, sophisticated taste can undertake translations of such foreign-language writers who are alien to them in style, convictions, and spiritual disposition.
These masters have one very rare advantage: they know how to curb their individual preferences, sympathies, tastes for the sake of the most prominent identification of the creative personality that they must recreate in translation.
In one of Kipling's stories, a pompous and pompous German says about his monkey that “there is too much Ego in its Cosmos.” The same can be said about some translators. Meanwhile, the modern reader, as a person of a deeply scientific culture, increasingly urgently demands from them all possible suppression of their excessive Ego. However, this demand has been heard for a long time.
“In translation from Goethe,” Belinsky said, “we want to see Goethe, and not his translator; if Pushkin himself had undertaken to translate Goethe, we would have demanded from him that he show us Goethe, and not himself” 28 .
Gogol made the same demand for translators. “The translator acted in such a way,” he wrote about one translation, “that you can’t see it: it turned into such a transparent “flow that it seems as if there was no glass” 29.
It's not that easy. This needs to be learned. This requires a lot of training.
Here the highest virtue is the discipline of limiting one's sympathies and tastes.
The famous translator of the Iliad, N. I. Gnedich, points out that the greatest difficulty facing the translator of the ancient poet is “a continuous struggle with one’s own spirit, with one’s own inner strength, whose freedom must constantly be curbed” 30 .
“Continuous struggle with one’s own spirit”, overcoming one’s personal aesthetics is the duty of all translators, especially those who translate great poets.
In this case, you need to love the translated author more than yourself and selflessly, selflessly serve the embodiment of his thoughts and images, showing your ego only in this service, and not at all in imposing your own tastes and feelings on the original.
It would seem that it is not a difficult task to translate this or that writer without embellishing or improving him, and yet only through very long practice does the translator learn to suppress the attraction to personal creativity in order to become a faithful and honest comrade, and not a shameless owner of the translated author . I once translated Walt Whitman and since then, for each new edition, I have been repairing my translations anew: almost all the repairs consist of me carefully throwing out those word patterns and ornaments that, out of inexperience, I introduced into the first edition of my translation. Only through long, many years of effort am I gradually approaching that “roughness” that distinguishes the original. I am afraid that, despite all my efforts, I have still not been able to convey in translation all the “wild sloppiness” of the original, for it is extremely easy to write better, more gracefully than Whitman, but it is very difficult to write as “badly” as he.
Here again Gnedich comes to mind.
“It is very easy,” he wrote, “to decorate, or better yet, to tint a verse of Homer with the colors of our palette, and it will seem more dapper, more magnificent, better for our taste; but it is incomparably more difficult to preserve it Homeric, as it is, neither worse nor better. This is the responsibility of a translator, and the work of those who have experienced it is not easy. Quintilian understood it: facilius est plus facere, quam idem: it is easier to do more than the same” 31.
As a result, Gnedich asked readers “not to judge if any turn of phrase or expression seems strange or unusual, but first... check it with the original” 32 .
This should be the same request to the reader from every translator.
Just as a good actor will most clearly demonstrate his individuality if he completely transforms himself into the Falstaff, Khlestakov or Chatsky he portrays, fulfilling with every gesture the sacred will of the playwright, so a good translator reveals his personality in its entirety precisely when he completely subordinates it to the will of the Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Hemingway, Salinger, Joyce or Kafka he translates.
Such self-restraint of translators was not always considered obligatory. In Pushkin’s times, for example, it was constantly published in magazines that “translating poets into one’s native language means either borrowing the main idea and decorating it with the richness of one’s own dialect (my italics - K. Ch.), or, comprehending the power of poetic expressions, conveying them with faithfulness in your own language" 33 . It was considered completely legal to “decorate” the translated texts with “the riches of one’s own dialect,” since at that time the goals of translation were completely different. But now the time for decorative translations has passed. Our era will not allow any deliberate deviations from the translated text, simply because its attitude towards the literatures of all countries and peoples is primarily educational.
And there is nothing to fear that such a translation will allegedly depersonalize the translator and deprive him of the opportunity to show his creative talent. This has never happened before. If the translator is talented, the will of the author does not fetter, but, on the contrary, inspires him. The art of a translator, like the art of an actor, is completely dependent on the material. Just as the highest achievement of acting is not in deviation from the will of the playwright, but in merging with it, in complete submission to it, so the art of a translator, in its highest achievements, lies in merging with the will of the author.
Many people find this controversial. Professor F.D. Batyushkov, arguing with me, wrote:
“A translator cannot be likened to an actor... The actor, however, is subordinate to the author’s intention. But in every poetic idea there is a number of possibilities, and the artist creates one of these possibilities. Othello - Rossi, Othello - Salvini, Othello - Olridge, Othello - Zacconi, etc. - these are all different Othellos on the canvas of Shakespeare's plan. And how many Hamlets, King Lears we know, etc., etc., etc. Duse created a completely different Marguerite Gautier than Sarah Bernhardt, and both are possible, viable, each in their own way. The translator cannot exercise such freedom when “recreating the text.” He must reproduce what is given. The actor, embodying, has the opportunity to discover new things; the translator, like the philologist, cognizes the known 34.
This objection of Professor F. Batyushkov turns out to be untenable at the first contact with the facts.
Wasn’t “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” translated by forty-five translators into forty-five different modes? Isn’t each of these forty-five reflected the creative personality of the translator with all its individual qualities to the same extent as the creative personality of the actor is reflected in each role? Just as there is Othello - Rossi, Othello - Salvini, Othello - Olridge, Othello - Dalsky, Othello - Ostuzhev, Othello - Papazyan, etc., there is “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” by Ivan Novikov, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” by Nikolai Zabolotsky, etc., etc. All these poets, it would seem, “cognized what was known” by other poets, but to each of them the “cognized” was revealed in a new way, with its own different features.
How many translations of Shota Rustaveli do we know, and not a single translation is in any way similar to the others. And this difference was due to the same reasons as the difference between the various incarnations of the theatrical image: the temperament, talent, cultural equipment of each poet-translator.
So Professor Batyushkov’s objections further affirm the truth against which he argues.
And, of course, the Soviet viewer sees the ideal actor as one who, in voice, gestures, and figure, transforms himself into either Richard III, or Falstaff, or Khlestakov, or Krechinsky. And the personality of the actor - rest assured! - will be expressed in his game by itself, in addition to his desires and efforts. An actor should not consciously strive for such protrusion of his self under any circumstances.
It's the same with translators. The modern reader holds most dear only those of them who, in their translations, try not to overshadow with their personality either Heine, Ronsard, or Rilke.
The poet Leonid Martynov does not want to agree with this. He finds the very idea that he should curb his personal preferences and tastes offensive. Turn into transparent glass? Never! Addressing those whom he has so far translated so diligently and carefully, L. Martynov now declares to them with pride:
...I put my own notes into someone else’s text,
I added my sins to those of others,
and as a result of thoughtful work
I still modernized the poems.
And this is true, foreign brothers;
although I listen to your voices,
but bend like a lady dancing,
as in dans-macabre or country dance,
convey the finest nuances
Middle Ages or Renaissance -
I don’t have a chance to succeed in that,
I can't, I exist on my own!
I can't literally and literally
like a parrot echoing a cockatoo!
Let what you create be brilliant,
I will translate everything in my own way,
and a brutal raid on me
a militia of interpreters will start:
they say, a thief in the night, he distorted slyly
meaning of classical speeches.
Then I hear: - Go for it! You have the right
and in our time of these things
were not avoided. Antokolsky Pavel
let him grumble, but it doesn’t matter.
Who hasn’t added their own to someone else’s?
This is how they did it everywhere and always!
Each of us has a reason
add, maintaining impartiality,
your indignation into someone else's grief,
into someone else's smoldering fire 35.
This declaration of translation liberties sounds very proud and even arrogant.
But we, the readers, humbly believe that the will of the translator has nothing to do with it.
After all, as we have just seen, every translator brings into every translation he makes a certain particle of his own personality. Translators always and everywhere add -
your indignation into someone else's grief,
into someone else's decay of your fire, -
and sometimes into someone else’s fire - your own decay.
In Hamlet, translated by Boris Pasternak, Pasternak's voice is heard, in Hamlet, translated by Mikhail Lozinsky, the voice of Lozinsky is heard, in Hamlet, translated by Vlas Kozhevnikov, Kozhevnikov's voice is heard, and nothing can be done about it. This is fatal. Literary translations are artistic because they, like any work of art, reflect the master who created them, whether he wants it or not.
We, readers, welcome all translations in which Martynov was reflected in one way or another, but we still dare to note that we would be very grateful to him if, say, in his translations of Petőfi’s poems there was as little Martynov as possible and as much as Petőfi as possible.
This is how it has been until now. In all his translations, Martynov, out of his characteristic conscientiousness, sought to reproduce as accurately as possible all the images, feelings and thoughts of Petofi.
Now another time has come, and Martynov unexpectedly notifies readers that if he happens to translate, say, “Hamlet,” this “Hamlet” will be not so much Shakespeare’s as Martynov’s, since he considers it humiliating for himself to bow before Shakespeare, “ like a lady in a dance, as in a danse-macabre or a country dance.”
I am afraid that in response to his declaration, polite readers will say that although at another time and under other circumstances they would read the translator’s own poems with great pleasure, now, when they are faced with the need to familiarize themselves with Shakespeare’s tragedy “Hamlet” through his translation, they consider I have the right to wish that in this translation there would again be less Martynov and perhaps more Shakespeare.
Of course, no one ever demanded “parrot” translations from him. Everyone was completely satisfied with his previous translations, in which he so well conveyed the poetic charm of the originals.
These are the kind of translations that our era demands, which values documentation, accuracy, authenticity, and reality above all else. And even if it later turns out that, despite all the efforts, the translator nevertheless reflected himself in the translation, he can be justified only if this happened unconsciously. And since the basic nature of the human personality is reflected not only in its conscious, but also in its unconscious manifestations, then even without the will of the translator, his personality will be sufficiently expressed.
It's unnecessary to worry about this. Let him only care about the accurate and objective reproduction of the original. By doing this, he will not only not cause any damage to his creative personality, but, on the contrary, will demonstrate it with the greatest strength.
This is what Leonid Martynov has done so far. In general, for some reason it seems to me that this whole rebellion against “danse macabres” and “counterdances” is a momentary whim of the poet, an instant flash, a whim, which, I hope, will not affect his future translation work in any way.
Notes:
1. “Literary newspaper”, 1933, No. 38, p. 2.
2.The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman. New York - London, 1902, vol. 9, p. 39 (written in 1855 or 1856).
3. The first number in brackets indicates the page of the English edition of “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley with Memoir, Explanatory Notes, etc” (London, James Finch and C0.), the second - the page of Balmont’s translation (Shelley. Poly. collected op. translated by K. D. Balmont, vol. I. St. Petersburg, Znanie, 1903).
4.See: Walt Whitman. Grass shoots. Translation from English by K. D. Balmont. M., book publishing house "Scorpio", 1911, p. 133, 136, 139. In further references to this book, its pages are indicated by numbers placed after each quotation.
5. Letter to N. I. Gnedich dated September 27, 1822. - A.S. Pushkin. Complete, collected cit., vol. XIII. M. -L. , Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1937, p. 48.
6.F. I. Tyutchev. Complete collection of poems. L., 1939, p. 222.
7. From European poets of the 16th-19th centuries. Translations by V. Levin. M., 1956, p. 67, 68.
8.O. Kholmskaya. Pushkin and translation discussions of Pushkin’s time. - Sat. "The Mastery of Translation". M., 1959, p. 307.
9. “Instead of a preface. Excerpt from a letter." - Complete works of V. A. Zhukovsky, vol. II. St. Petersburg, 1906, p. 216.
10.P. Chernyaev. How modern and subsequent critics appreciated the translation of Zhukovsky’s “Odyssey”. - “Philological Notes”, 1902, issue. I-III. With. 156, 158.
11.L. Borovoy. Traitor Coriolanus. - “Literary Newspaper”, 1934, No. 22.
12.I. S. Turgenev. Full collection Op. and letters in 28 volumes. Letters, vol. III. M. -L. , 1961, p. 30.
13. Collection of the Society for benefits to needy writers and scientists. St. Petersburg, 1884, p. 498.
14.Collected works of Senkovsky (Baron Brambeus), vol. VII. St. Petersburg, 1859, p. 332. (Hereinafter, italics are mine. - K. Ch.).
15. N.V. Gogol. About the Odyssey, translated by Zhukovsky. - Full. collection cit., vol. VIII. M., 1952, p. 240. (Emphasis by me. - K. Ch.).
16.Collected works of A.V. Druzhinin, vol. III. St. Petersburg, 1865, p. 40.
17.I. S. Turgenev. Full collection Op. and letters in 28 volumes. Letters, vol. 3. M. - L., 1961, p. 84.
18.A. S. Bulgakov. Early acquaintance with Shakespeare in Russia. - “Theatrical Heritage”, collection. 1. L., 1934, p. 73-75.
19.A. S. Bulgakov. Early acquaintance with Shakespeare in Russia, p. 78.
20. Levon Mkrtchyan. Avetik Isahakyan and Russian literature. Yerevan, 1963. p. 120.
21. Ibid., p. 126.
22.P. F. Yakubovich. Poems. L., 1960, p. 338.
23. Letters from V. Ya. Bryusov to P. P. Pertsov. M., 1926, p. 76.
24.Sh. Corbet. From the history of Russian-French literary relations. - In the book: International relations of Russian literature. Under. by the editors of academician M. P. Alekseeva. M. - L., Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1963, p. 203.
25.Georgian classical poetry in translations by N. Zabolotsky, vol. I. Tbilisi, 1958, p. 512. About David Guramishvili, see the article “Speech of Rasul Gamzatov” in the book: Irakli Andronikov. I want to tell you... M., 1962, p. 325-327.
26.N. Zabolotsky. Translator's notes. - In the book: The Mastery of Translation. M., 1959, p. 252.
27.F. M. Dostoevsky. Writer's diary for 1880. We're talking about Pushkin. - Full. collection works of art, vol. XII. M. -L., 1929, p. 387.
28.V. G. Belinsky. Full collection cit., vol. IX. M. 1955, p. 277.
29.N. V. Gogol. Full collection cit., vol. XIV. M., 1952, p. 170.
30.N. I. Gnedich. Poems. L., 1956. p. 316.
31.N. I. Gnedich. Poems. L., 1956, p. 316.
33. “Moscow Telegraph”, 1829, No. 21. I quote from the article by G. D. Vladimirsky “Pushkin the Translator” in the 4-5th book of the “Vremennik of the Pushkin Commission” (“Pushkin”. M. -L., 1939, p. 303).
34.See brochure: Principles of literary translation. Articles by F. D. Batyushkov, N. Gumilev, K. Chukovsky. L., 1920, p. 14-15.
35. Leonid Martynov. Translation problem. - “Youth”, 1963, No. 3.
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