ABSTRACT
Boris Slutskii began his work as a translator of poetry in the late 1940s, when he could not publish his own poetry. Even when he became established as a published poet, with the appearance of his first collection in 1957, he continued translating many poets from numerous languages, mostly via interlinear translations. The recurring allusions to Pasternak, both in the poem and in Slutskii's translations of Bertolt Brecht. It suggests that Slutskii's engagement with a poet who could be seen as his "alternative self" led him by way of the persistent emphasis on compromise and guilt in Brecht's texts to a confrontation with himself. Brecht and Slutskii had one more thing in common: until the post-Stalin Thaw both were more or less marginalized figures in official Soviet culture. Slutskii's Brecht translations, by suggesting numerous parallels between the regime in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, act as "a site of resistance to official Soviet culture and values".
