ABSTRACT
Ivan Aksenov, critic, poet, and translator, was a brilliant representative of the genre-crossing and internationalist spirit of the Russian avant-garde. His early poetry was original and provocative, thematically as well as formally. The same is true for his controversial translation practices. Form and rhythm would remain the key concepts in everything Aksenov wrote the following 23 years, irrespective of the theme: painting or verse, drama or translation, and stage production or cinema. What none of the critics seems to have appreciated was the dual purpose of Aksenov's experiment—on the one hand, opposition to the Russian tradition of extensive adaptation of any translation to the presumed tastes of the reader. To return to Aksenov's "literalist" fragments of Pan Tadeusz, it is obvious that the translation neither sticks very closely to Adam Mickiewicz's characteristic 13-syllabic pattern, nor to his vocabulary. The syllabic verse of Aksenov indeed takes us further back, beyond Polish Romanticism, to the seventeenth century.
