Icarus: Autotrans

By Dmitry Garanin

Bilingual Russian / English book of poems in Russian and their English translations by the author. 2x30 rhymed and metered as well as free-verse poems plus English translations of 5 Russian classical poems. Arcus NY.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365016974

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Poems collected in this bilingual book are my translations of my own poems from Russian. The poems in the first part are rhymed, and so are the translations that try to preserve the prosody of the originals. Keeping in mind that currently rhymed poetry in English is being considered as absolete by most, this project becomes something like that of the ancient hero Icarus. This, probably, explains the title of the book. In the second part I added some free verses, to be more compliant.

According to the common view, 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 to quantify and it is an arduous task to prove whether the translator