2021年11月12日 星期五

Nabokov's Eugene Onegin TRANSLATION. Stolen Inspiration: On Translating Pushkin





Nabokov himself strove to render a literal translation that captured "the exact contextual meaning of the original," arguing that, "only this is true translation." Nabokov's Eugene Onegin remains the most famous and frequently cited English-language version of the most celebrated poem in Russian literature, a ...Jan 1, 2020


Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse: Text (Vol. 1) - Project MUSE
https://muse.jhu.edu › book








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On Translating "Eugene Onegin" | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com › ... › Eugene Onegin





What is translation? On a platter. View Article. Published in the print edition of the January 8, 1955, issue. Vladimir Nabokov, who died in 1977, ...




On Translating Eugene Onegin
https://www.york.ac.uk › onegin › nabokov_1955


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Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight. This is my task a poet's patience. And scholastic passion blent: Dove-droppings on your monument. Vladimir Nabokov ...










Osip MandelshtamFULCRUM: an annual of poetry and aesthetics 都分享了 1 張相片



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Osip Mandelshtam







Stolen Inspiration: On Translating Pushkin
Here are some thoughts provoked by a discussion of translatability in a literary translators' group, and specifically by remarks about the oft-affirmed difficulty of translating Pushkin's poetry and by Vladimir Nabokov's proclamation of Pushkin's untranslatability. I am well aware of Nabokov's position. Alas, his "prose" translation of Eugene Onegin, about which he was so defensive, does not, so far as I can tell, cause a lot of people to fall in love with the translated work. Other translators have done better with Eugene Onegin.
I myself, as someone who has just published my own translations of Pushkin's selected poems, make no such claim about the difficulty of translating them. I make a very different claim. I am a poet and a virtuoso of formal verse. The art of verse translation amounts for me to
what I call stolen inspiration. When I stare at an untranslated poem, it stares back at me in its sheer untranslatability: it seems utterly, forbiddingly untranslatable. And then I start translating. And now it's only a matter of time. Stanza follows stanza, like electrical crossword puzzles, the pieces at first making no sense and then falling into place and lighting up. And I experience, in the process, the quantifiable energy surge -- the inspiration -- that the original poet put into the lext. In this case, I laughed Pushkin's laughs and wept his tears. Stolen inspiration. So I go stanza by stanza, and then -- o magical moment! -- the untranslatable lies translated before me, and I am myself quite amazed. I'll confess that at such moments I feel pretty emotional, and at times I shed a tear or two of delight and gratitude.
And now that my volume of translations is out and about, perhaps my hopes are too grandiose, but they are on Pushkin's behalf and not my own. I hope that it's time for the world to reevaluate exactly how Pushkin's lyric poetry stacks up against its English counterparts, against Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats... Is he any good? What is it that the Russians see in him? Is he even translatable? It is time to start asking those questions again, and I hope folks will start asking them.
可能是顯示的文字是「 bilingual book 79 poems by translated by Alexander Pushkin Philip Nikolayev "I cannot think of a better introduction to Pushkin for the English reader!" William Mills Todd III Harvard University 」的圖像

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