When ПушкинComes to Shove

[Alex Shafarenko]

Just a little extra point to what I have already said. One should ask oneself who the judge of translated poetry should be.
There is a tacit acceptance of the fact that it is always the target-language audience. At first glance that is how 
it should be, since it is their language after all; they are supposed to know what is beautiful in it and what is not. 
But in reality beauty comes from the original, and the target language is only the prism through which the original 
is supposed to shine. I believe that makes it important that a good translation is seen as such by bilinguals. 

"Ambidextrous" bilinguals were exceedingly rare in the old days of the Iron Curtain (the emigrée community did not 
on the whole have a strong interest in Anglo-Saxon culture, despite some notable exceptions), while nowadays 
I think there is a small army of Russians who grew up in an English-speaking country, many of them having 
a strong interest in their ancestral culture and fluency in its language. There is also a large number 
of cultured Russian speakers who speak excellent English and are well-versed in English poetry, both classical 
and modern. 

My point is, I have struggled to find a single bilingual of this kind who would approve of forensic translations 
of Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam, Paternak, Brodsky, etc. Raised eyebrows and a polite smile is all you get. 
They hate inept/loose conformal translations even more, true, as they feel that those misrepresent the original. Give 
them a good one, like Wilbur's masterful rendering of Brodsky's "Six Years Later" and watch them touched, amazed, 
elated and asking tons of questions (the first one would be "where can I buy a book of this kind of translations 
for my Anglophone friend, partner, kids, etc..."). Nobody complains about getting inexact information content. Nobody
says it is only an imitation (the original poet, who had the habit of scrutinising all translations of his work into
English, did neither -- surprise!). 

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. People who can read the originals, who love the originals and feel protective 
of them also love some of my translations. Whatever a purist might think about possibility/impossibility, 
I hope I may be forgiven if I say these people know better. Usually their criteria are "do I hear the voice of
the original poet? does the poem send shivers down my spine?", not just "do I recognise the poem and not feel 
offended by the translator's liberties". 

Needless to say that I strongly agree with Inna and look forward to her forthcoming paper 
on the subject when it is published.  

Alex



 
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