Please join us to celebrate the 10th anniversary of National Translation Month with its editor-in-chief, poet and translator Claudia Serea, and the alumni of the Fall 2021 Russian-English Literary Translation course, whose experimental translations of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 87 back into the English language from seven Russian translations are being published this month by NTM. Discussion open to the public.
There is not a person however faintly familiar with the business of translation who does not know that something is unavoidably lost in it. “Lost” is a word that evokes Odyssean nostalgia—a dream of homecoming as a response to inevitable separation. Among the most archetypical examples are Milton’s Paradise Lost and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In similar vein, Walter Benjamin writes in his scandalous and messianic “The Task of the Translator” that any expression in a national language, such as English or Russian, takes place after the original sin, the perfect babel, of “alien tongues” and that the only antidote is the return to “pure language”—an aspiration also reflected in Milton’s and Proust’s new testaments: Paradise Regain’d and Time Regained.
To test Benjamin’s theory, the graduate students of Russian-English Literary Translation course, subtitled “From Russian with Love” and taught by Vasily Lvov at Hunter College in the fall of 2021, undertook the homecoming of Shakespeare back into English from the Russian of his translators: Nikolai Gerbel, Modest Tchaikovsky, Samuil Marshak, Alexander Finkel, Igor Fradkin, and Vladimir Gandelsman. Some of them struggled with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87 in the nineteenth century, like Nikolai Gerbel and Modest Tchaikovsky (the brother of the great composer), others in the twentieth, while Gandelsman, one of the finest living Russian poets, in the twenty-first.