Expansion

By Dmitry Garanin

45 poems translated from Russian by the author. Mostly poems by the author plus several of his personal favorites from Russian classics. Arcus NY Publishing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781716259708

Book preview

Russian.

INTRODUCTION

Poems collected in this book are my translations from Russian, mainly translations of my own poems. In its last part, I added my translations of other authors' works. Since I am not specializing as a translator, this last part of the book is short. I have chosen only a few of my personal favorites.

The main goal of this book is traversing the language barrier, expanding from Russian into the English-speaking space. This explains the title. Of course, one can say that any translator is doing this. However, in our case translator is the author himself that happens rarely.

According to the common view, the translator should have the best possible command of the target language, that is, should be native to it. Then the translation will sound fully authentic and will be readable without problems. However, in this case, connection with the original may be weaker, and the translator's personality may leave its imprint changing the character of the work.

The advantage of the author's own translation, if the author is capable of doing it at all, can be explained by the theory operating with the so-called non-verbal image of the poem. Some authors are speaking about this non-verbal image as pre-existing in space or broadcasted by a divine force so that they are only translating it into the textual form in their preferred language. Whether this can be scientifically proven or not, it is, anyway, an attractive model of creative writing.

One of the theories of poetry translation says that translator has to get to the original non-verbal image of the poem and translate it into the new language, instead of translating the text – being a translation rather than original, according to this view. On this way translations can be done that are closer to the spirit of the original, although possibly further away from the original text. Since the spirit is difficult