A.S. Pushkin in modern English translations: strategies of poetry representation

Despite all the two-centuries long efforts of numerous translators to render A.S. Pushkin's lyric poetry into English, an English-speaking reader still has not acquired more or less adequate idea about it, as stated by many renowned scholars and translators themselves. The very features of Pushkin's lyric text structure and poetics account for it: he can't be adequately translated because the base of Pushkin's poetic style is a masterful and delightful use of all the shades of meaning which is imparted to the language by the existence of case inflections and a free word order. The absence of them in the target language gives some ''straightforwardness'' to translations' style; the themes and literary images turn out plain and simple. But the interest to Pushkin's poetry on behalf of the English-speaking word-cultures has been genuine and intense, which is obvious from a great number of new continuously emerging translations and translation projects. Without claiming to be a comprehensive survey of all modern translations from Pushkin, this paper focuses on several most recent and interesting issues of Pushkin's poetry in English. One of the strategies to be most productive and relevant to the material is the strategy which has been demonstrated by the translator Julian Henry Lowenfeld. His is the strategy of vocal translation, mostly used to render the texts which display a rhythmical and intonation structure, which is adopted to musical melody and inseparable from it. The existence of this melodic base gives the opportunity to hold the text in memory and enables the translator to find adequate imagery, stylistic, rhythmical and phonetic means of rendering the stylistic effect of the original text. The translator himself names the sense of rhythm among the most important qualities in translating Pushkin's verse. The above-mentioned strategy is opposed to another one, which has been demonstrated in one of the recent editions of Pushkin's poetry in English: ''After Pushkin. Versions of the poems of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin by contemporary poets'', 1999. On reading this edition which in its contents presents the most traditional set of Pushkin's poetry, readers' expectations turn out to be completely ruined. In some translations Pushkin appears a modernist, in others - an existentialist; some translations in their poetic quality are very much akin to Pushkin's poetics style and adequately represent his style, some of them clearly present word-for-word translations. And in the context of this edition these word-for-word translations acquire the status of an aesthetic phenomenon. The very Pushkin's conception of poetic creativity seems to have fallen apart and is presented through individual conceptions of his interpreters, which is demonstrated by the peculiarities of translations' poetics, new text titles, as well as stated in the editor's introductory word, who comments on the working principles of various translations' authors. Notwithstanding the difference in the approach principles to the material for translation, the strategies described imply one and the same aim: to help an English-speaking reader answer the question: why Pushkin stand side by side with Byron, Shakespeare, Goethe and other genius men of the world word-culture.

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