ABSTRACT
E fim Grigorievich Etkind was a philologist, writer, and translator. He was educated at Leningrad University by outstanding scholars, such as V. I. Propp, G. A. Gukovskii, V. M. Zhirmuskii and others. A Soviet army translator during World War II, he later employed his superb command of foreign languages for translating works by Lope de Vega, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine and Brecht. He was fired from his teaching job at the Herzen Institute of Foreign Languages in Leningrad and expelled from the Writers’ Union for his participation in protests against government persecution of Solzhenitsyn and Brodskii. In 1974, he emigrated to France where he taught Russian civilization courses at the University of Paris-Nanterre and at the Sorbonne. A leading Soviet specialist on poetic translation, he advocated a broad philological approach to the study of translation theory, an approach that would combine linguistic and literary aspects of transla-
as comparative stylistics. His philological works included Seminars in French Stylistics [Seminarii po francuzskoi stilistike, 1961], On the Art of Reading [Ob iskusstve byt’ chitatelem, 1963], Poetry and Translation [Poeziia i perevod, 1963], French Poetry Translated by Russian Poets from the 19thand 20th centuries [Francuzskie stikhi v perevode russkikh poetov XIX-XX vv., 1969], Bertolt Brecht. Life and Art [Bertol’t Brekht. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 1971], Form as Content, [Forma kak soderzhanie, 1976], Poems and People. Stories about Poems [Stikhi i liudi. Rasskazy o stikhotvoreniiakh, 1989], and others. Together with Georges Nivat, he co-authored the monumental A History of Russian Literature [Historie de la littérature russe, 1987-1992]. Just this partial list of Etkind’s scholarly works gives an idea of the broad scope of his philological interests and of his wide-ranging expertise. Published in 1971, during a short period of the so-called political thaw, Etkind’s article about Benedikt Livshits, a poet and translator killed in Stalin’s prison camps, can be viewed as one of his numerous acts of civic courage.
