The Russian Fate of Robert Burns’s Poem “My Heart’s in the Highlands” (The 19th - First Half of the 20th Centuries)

The article considers the history of the Russian translation reception of Robert Burns’s poem “My Heart’s in the Highlands” in the 19th - the first half of the 20th centuries. The materials for the analysis are published translations of the poem created by M.N. Shelgunov (1879), M.A. Rossiysky (1880, published in 1913), R.F. Brandt (O. Golovnin) (1886), A. M. Fedorov (1896), O.N. Chyumina (1897), T.L. Shchepkina-Kupernik (published in 1936), S.Ya. Marshak (1938), and translations by V.M. Mikheyev (the 1880s), V.E. Cheshikhin (Ch. Vetrinsky) (1890 or 1891), B.F. Lebedev (the 1930s), M.A. Mendelssohn-Prokofyeva (1938), found in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and first introduced by us. Methodologically, the research relies on fundamental works in the field of historical poetics, comparative study, history of Russian translated imaginative literature, theory and history of poetic translation (Alexander N. Veselovsky, Alexey N. Veselovsky, V.M. Zhirmunsky, M.P. Alekseyev, Yu.D. Levin, A.V. Fedorov, E.G. Etkind, etc.), and also on works of Soviet and Russian researchers on Burns’s biography and creativity, perception of Burns’s heritage in Russia (S.A. Orlov, A.A. Golikov, E.I. Klimenko, A.A. Elistratova, B. I. Kolesnikov, E.S. Belashova, et al.). In the course of the analysis, we note responses to Burns’s poem in works and letters of Russian writers, particularly, in I.S. Turgenev’s letters to Pauline Viardot of 20 November (2 October) 1859 and 11 November (23 November) 1864, and to A.A. Fet of 16 August (28 August) 1871, in V.G. Tan-Bogoraz’s novel Za okeanom (“Across the Ocean”, 1904), etc. Translations of Robert Burns’s poem “My Heart’s in the Highlands” show numerous and convincing evidence of a possibility of preserving the Scottish author’s identity; however, they do not transfer the whole originality of the work, in particular, repetitions, synonymic pairs are quite often omitted, but their sources are in Scottish folklore, in the national song, with which Bums’s poetry is genetically linked. Some translations are characterized by the loss of dynamics, caused by verbosity, use of inverse phrases, making the description heavier (R.F. Brandt (O. Golovnin), A.M. Fedorov). As for others, they are characterized by some negligence in work with the word, inappropriate choice of lexemes from a synonymic row, unjustified introduction of literary details, which Burns does not have (B.F. Lebedev, T.L. Shchepkina-Kupernik). The appearance of S.Ya. Marshak’s brilliant translation became a milestone in the Russian translation reception of the poem “My Heart’s in the Highlands”. The translator preserved the emotional atmosphere of the original, particularly, the motif of grief, caused by parting with native places, and the motif of unification of the person and nature. The best of new translations, which were published only at the end of the 20th century, were created with involuntary looking back at achievements of the translator-predecessor.

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